The influences that shape new musical trends are diffuse, complex and impossible to codify, but if one person can be credited as being the fountainhead of modern music it is Franz Liszt … in three, totally different, stylistic directions. Whether we like his own compositions or not, we cannot avoid contact with Liszt if we have contact with music from the late nineteenth or twentieth centuries.
First, the heady combination of bel canto with chromaticism, a Lisztian fingerprint formed early in his life, was a major influence on Wagner and Wagner’s progeny. It has been claimed that Liszt invented the ‘Tristan chord’. Even if such a ‘patent’ is open to discussion, the febrile harmonic instability of Tristan und Isolde is heard in Liszt before it is heard in his son-in-law. On rare occasions of collegial generosity Wagner even admitted this debt.
A clearer and more direct path of influence can be seen in the stark rhythmic primitivism of some of Liszt’s late piano pieces – Csárdás macabre (1881/2) is one notable example. The percussive atonality of these astonishing experiments, with their new colours and textures, is heard clearly in his compatriots Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, and it opened the door for a whole century of piano music.
Throughout his creative life Liszt used impressionistic titles for his works – lakes, mountains, snow, forests abound. But not titles alone. A work such as Les Jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este (1877) from the third book of Années de pèlerinage shares both title and texture with Ravel; and two generations later Olivier Messiaen adopted Liszt’s use of the key of F sharp major in a piece such as Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude as a symbol of spiritual contemplation in his own piano and organ music.
Liszt III: the man who broke pianos
Apart from Liszt’s influence on concert life and the music we hear there, his inventive prowess at the keyboard actually changed the way we play the instrument, and forced piano makers to keep up to speed too.
It’s no good learning how to execute octaves and chords with power and velocity if the action of the instrument itself jams up or breaks down. Beethoven’s piano famously spewed broken strings out of its case in his more ferocious moments, but Liszt apparently broke the cases themselves. After one of his opera paraphrases the heaving, trembling instrument would be at his feet, utterly spent, and a new one would have to be carried out onto the stage from the wings. Those early, wooden- framed pianos simply could not cope with playing that now flowed in energy and force from shoulder and back, rather than merely with the earlier finger, wrist and forearm technique of a Hummel or a Czerny.
This is not to extol the virtues of banging, or to undermine the skill and subtlety of the earlier players, it is simply that Liszt discovered (uncovered) the full potential of a developing instrument, which was eventually to become a one-man orchestra. To provide more power the frames of the instruments needed to be stronger to support the increased tension of the strings and the force with which the hammers would strike them, and piano makers vied with one another to gain the endorsement of Liszt, the greatest pianist of the era. Erard, Bechstein, Chickering, Bösendorfer, Steinway all claimed that Liszt favoured them above the others. In fact the competition between these companies probably helped to improve the quality of them all, thus encouraging composers to push the boundaries even further. By the time Prokofiev was writing the mammoth cadenza in his Second Piano Concerto (1912) the total string tension on a concert grand piano would exceed 20 tonnes.
Liszt’s abstract sonata
The restraint of the abstract did not come easily to Liszt. He was by nature a storyteller, a man of the stage, a theatrical prophet who burned to communicate a poetic-romantic vision. But in his case the stage was not set for an opera. Rather, it is Liszt himself who is the character, the subject.
The vast majority of his works bear descriptive titles. As Noah naming his animals, or as Santa Claus wrapping even the most modest gifts in shimmering paper, Liszt imposed the flourish of an appellation to most of his pieces. Études became a ‘Wild Chase’ or ‘Evening Harmonies’; nocturnes became ‘Dreams of Love’; waltzes were ‘melancholy’, ‘Mephistophelian’, or even ‘forgotten’. But when it came to his sole work in sonata form … nothing, merely Grande Sonate pour le pianoforte par F. Liszt.
Just over a hundred years earlier, and just under a hundred miles away from where Liszt was living in Weimar, a Mass was written in the same B minor key. It was Bach’s only known complete work in that form. That the Lutheran from Leipzig would not write many Masses is understandable, but that Liszt, a man of such manifold talent, energy and years, would write only one sonata is puzzling. However, it is significant that the one he wrote is a masterpiece, and that he took great care in its construction (evident in the many pastings-over and corrections in the manuscript). It is the work that proves beyond all doubt that Liszt’s compositional genius was not just that of the inventor, the innovator, the elaborator – but that of the supreme architect as well.
Both Liszt concertos in the same concert?
Although performing two concertos in one concert is a lot more playing (and rehearsing) than for a usual engagement, it was a common occurrence in earlier generations. Eileen Joyce was known to play up to four concertos in one concert, and Artur Rubinstein would play multiple Mozarts or Beethovens or both Brahms concertos in the same concerts. It’s interesting, though, that he ruled out playing both Chopin concertos together: ‘They are too similar.’ But both Liszts?
Definitely! In fact they work beautifully and revealingly on the same programme because their differences (and similarities) show us much of what makes Liszt so innovative. They are the same length, around twenty minutes, but the First is four movements contracted into one unit, whereas the Second is one unit expanded into multiple sections. They both use the compositional technique (virtually invented by Liszt) of transformation of themes – a few small motivic cells become building blocks for the whole work, or, in Liszt’s case, more like costumes for characters in a drama – but the ‘plot’ of each concerto is very different. Their beginnings could not be more contrasting in mood: the First assertive, confident, swaggering, the Second dreamy, exploratory, tentative. Yet their opening three bars use the same motive: two descending semitones.
Liszt was almost certainly at his most creative in the act of improvising, and his two concertos are like spun-out cadenzas that were later tightened into concert works of superb architectural proportion.
Why Chopin’s B minor Sonata is harder to play than Liszt’s
We all like grading things – marks out of ten, five-star reviews, best in show and so on. Even Liszt’s own edition of the 32 Beethoven Sonatas lists them in ascending order of difficulty, beginning with op. 49 no. 2 and ending (of course) with op. 106, the Hammerklavier. Some of the choices in the middle seem puzzling or random – I don’t know, for example, why he would rank op. 26 as harder than op. 10 no. 3 – but it’s still a fascinating list, and topic.
Liszt has a reputation for writing music of the greatest difficulty, and some of his earlier études and transcriptions do indeed reach to the edges of the possible; but the pieces that we hear regularly (the mature works) are much less hard than they sound. In fact, that is part of the genius of Liszt: to make something sound more difficult than it is. He understood the keyboard and explored its possibilities like no other composer before him, and he laid the foundation on which everyone since has built. His glittering effects, which rendered his audiences open-mouthed with admiration, involve a principle of maximum effectiveness and minimal effort. Horowitz took this ‘spectacular simplification’ a step further with his transcriptions. Even in his straight performances of other people’s pieces, he often left out notes; lots of them sometimes. Has anyone – even Arturo Toscanini who was conducting on the occasion – ever noticed that in his 1940 recording of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto Horowitz misses out the final left-hand chord in every bar of the last movement’s main subject? Nevertheless, even if his war horse is missing this shoe, it still
gallops along with matchless excitement.
Neither Chopin’s nor Liszt’s B minor Sonata has as a principal (or even secondary) aim mere virtuosity; they are both serious works, beautifully crafted, highly expressive, but in completely different ways. Here are a few points about some specific contrasts between the two pieces:
LISZT: Can sound good even on a bad piano.
CHOPIN: Needs a fine, refined instrument.
LISZT: Apart from the fugato section the piano writing is not contrapuntal.
CHOPIN: This piece, like many in Chopin’s last years, is full of counterpoint.
LISZT: It is painted mainly in bold colours – emotionally and pianistically.
CHOPIN: Most of it is shades, hints, suggestions, half-lights.
LISZT: The mood is larger than life; it is onstage, in public.
CHOPIN: The mood is often restrained; behind the scenes, personal, private.
LISZT: Unashamedly romantic and ‘Byronic’.
CHOPIN: Balances carefully Classicism and Romanticism.
To play either piece wonderfully is as difficult as it is to play anything wonderfully – but a bad performance of the Liszt can still convey something of the heart of that piece, whereas a bad performance of the Chopin will probably miss the target altogether.
Why Liszt’s B minor Sonata is harder to record than Chopin’s
Studio recordings tend to favour works of intimacy, as long as you can get into the right frame of mind, and as long as the piano is responding properly. It has to do not just with the absence of an audience but with the kind of introspection involved in playing something over and over again, the self-examination, the aim to take one’s inner vision about a piece and fix it forever. Out of over sixty CDs the one I found most enjoyable to record was of Mompou’s piano music. These pieces are perfect to listen to alone, and they were perfect to record alone – with just a red light for company.
In a concert the Liszt Sonata can take wing, even to the point of carrying the player to unknown places. It’s one of those works where you feel the power of the narrative from the first moment. Its sweep, its bold character, its magnificent gestures, inspire and are inspired by a ‘live’ audience. In a good performance the whole hall can be on fire from the struck match of the first staccato octave Gs in the bass, to the climactic flames, which will lick around even the last seats of the balcony. In the isolation of a recording studio on a Tuesday morning this kind of drama can be difficult to conjure up. By the time the pianist has played enough for the engineer to get the right sound, sometimes for up to an hour, not only has physical tiredness set in, but the emotional fuel has been used up a little too.
But the repetition of passages in search of tonal and textural perfection is part of living with the Chopin Sonata, and intimacy is part of its character. To find the perfect transparency and balance between melody and accompaniment in the first movement’s second subject is a lifetime’s project. To judge the pedalling so that a seamless robe is wrapped around the coloratura singer in that melody, as flexible as a fine fabric’s response to every turn and twist, is one of the countless and never resolved challenges when playing the piece. Rarely in a concert does it work in every bar, and each wrinkle along the way can undermine confidence and courage. Alone with the red light there is time to explore, to examine, to experiment. Chopin’s domestic drama, too subtle for many stages, can unfold unhindered in front of a microphone.
Chopin and the development of piano technique
Two names are pivotal in the history of piano technique: Chopin and Liszt. Both came from a similar pianistic background, the classical callisthenics of Czerny, Hummel and Co., the meat of scales and the potatoes of arpeggios, but where the young Liszt was dazzled by Paganini’s acrobatics, Chopin was dazed by the sweet melancholy of Bellini’s bel canto. If Liszt, in his early opera paraphrases and études, seems like Samson pushing down pillars, causing the whole temple of conventional pianism to tumble in cascades of figuration, Chopin is more like Solomon reaching out for one of the Queen of Sheba’s more exotic perfumes.
This analogy of ‘reaching out’ is not idly chosen, for it is to this that the distinct contribution of Chopin can be traced. A much quoted and classic example of Chopin’s new approach to the keyboard is the first étude from op. 10 (the set is dedicated to Liszt). Here the routine, arpeggiated figuration covering the span of an octave (and covering endless pages of piano music of the time), becomes extended by two notes to a tenth, requiring a new technique of rotation. One could say, literally, that it becomes ‘more than a handful’. No longer are the fingers alone sufficient to execute this passage; the wrist and arm have to be used, and thus Chopin ‘elbows’ his way to a new panorama of pianism.
The examples in these études are as numerous as they are astoundingly innovative. Never is a pattern repeated, such is the fertility of his invention. The ‘black-key’ étude (no. 5) forces the player to adopt a new hand position on the keyboard. The cramped, curled finger shape favoured by an earlier generation of pianists is not possible for extended passages on the narrow black keys. One has to develop a more fluid, flatter finger position. It is interesting to note that Chopin liked to begin his students with the B major scale (containing the most black keys) rather than the usual C major scale to help develop this hand shape from the start. The second étude in A minor whispers its chromatic secrets between the three weak fingers, developing independence, strength and a limber legato. In the op. 25 set of études this overflowing inventiveness continues. The octave étude (no. 10) presents the idea of the legato octave, the cantabile octave; the ‘double-thirds’ étude (no. 6) features a new ‘sliding’ fingering supplied by the composer; and the ‘Winter Wind’ étude (no. 11) takes a further step in the technique of rotation, razor-sharp zigzags shredding the keyboard into chromatic ribbons.
Despite the influence of Hummel, especially in the concertos, Chopin’s astonishing keyboard innovations are unthinkable without his harmonic development. He didn’t just take Hummel’s writing and stretch it into more elegant shapes. Where Hummel seems satisfied with a carbolic-soap virtuosity – clean, fresh, bubbling, with a fresh-faced exhilaration – Chopin tends to dab his passagework with rare oils and perfumes. A comparison of the development sections of the two composers’ concertos is highly revealing. One’s first reaction hearing them side by side is surprise at how indebted Chopin was to Hummel, but after closer examination Hummel seems merely to be the caterpillar to Chopin’s butterfly.
Due to the early influence of Bellini, a ‘singing’ approach to the keyboard, both lyric and coloratura, is essential in all of Chopin’s music. It is never enough to ‘rattle out’ the notes, even in the most obviously virtuosic of his works; every phrase must come from the throat and lungs as much as from fingers and arms. Pedalling, tone production, voicing – in all of these Chopin was the great innovator. These qualities had all been required in earlier piano compositions of course, but where before the pedals had had a mainly functional use – padding out textures and aiding legato – now they become tools of infinite nuance. Chopin’s counterpoint too reveals itself in a more specifically pianistic way. Inner voices are highlighted, not, as in Bach or indeed Beethoven, for their melodic or motivic importance alone, but more tellingly because they supply a coloured filter to the harmonic lens.
Every one of Chopin’s works includes a prominent piano part. For a composer who wrote for such limited forces, his genius is all the more remarkable. Without the benefit of Liszt’s larger-than-life personality – the international performing career, long life, social connections, intellectual breadth, twinkling eye – Chopin was able, by the sheer quality and originality of his work, to be inseparably identified with his instrument.
Chopin, Rothko and the bowler hat
Chopin died in October 1849. Although he had struggled with ill-health for most of his adult life, his seven-month visit to the UK in 1848 could well have accelerated his decline as he shivered his way from London to Ed
inburgh and back, stopping in various draughty, damp places. His last London address was 4 St James Place. From his front door, he would have been able to walk in about three minutes (I timed it) to the front door of James Lock & Co., the famous hat shop, at 6 St James Street – trading at the same address since 1676.
Only weeks following the death of Chopin, a certain William Coke II (who was later to become the Earl of Leicester) walked into Lock’s to collect a newly commissioned hat. He had requested a design that would be extremely strong, and low enough in the crown, so that his gamekeepers would not have it knocked off by the branches of trees as they rode through his estate – Holkham, in Norfolk. He took the prototype hat outside and stamped vigorously on it with his full body-weight. When it remained intact he was satisfied. He paid the price of 12 shillings and returned home carrying what would become the most important hat in modern history: the bowler, named after Thomas and William Bowler who had actually manufactured the hat across the river in Southwark.
It was the first hat ever made that would bridge social gaps rather than delineate them, donned as it was by tramps and toffs – just as Chopin was perhaps the first low-born musician in history successfully to enter into the society of the aristocracy … on his terms. The bowler became a symbol of the middle class: those both upwardly and downwardly mobile could brush off its brittle dome, place it on their heads, and step into the street without remark or censure. It was also a hat much favoured by the Jewish communities of Europe, culminating in its immense popularity in the Weimar Republic. Significantly, there are few photographs of Nazis wearing bowlers.
Marcus Rothkowitz arrived in New York from Dvinsk in Russia (now Latvia) in 1913 at the age of ten, escaping with his family from the terror of the pogroms. Although they immediately moved out to Portland, Oregon, he returned to New York in the mid-1920s and began to study art. By the late 1940s he had moved towards complete abstraction and eventually became part of the group of painters known as the Abstract Expressionists. But, despite this, his work is by far the most ‘Romantic’ of those who were his contemporaries. The blur and burnish of his mature, pulsating canvases seems to draw the viewer into a hypnotic, mystical world; and if ‘Romanticism’ suggests the subjective vision of the individual, I cannot think of any paintings less conducive to being shared than Rothko’s. They have to be experienced in deep silence and solitude. Although they were created in an era of publicity and pop, their uncompromising seriousness forces us to an inner desert to view them.
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