jwilzewske: liszt

Showing posts with label liszt. Show all posts

Friday, January 28, 2011

Sociotropic Provenance of Liszt’s Mid-Career Piano Works

The santa indifferenza of Liszt is the ‘holy indifference’ advocated by St. François de Sales and other spiritual writers in the Catholic mystical tradition. And this in turn is obviously identical with the non-attachment advocated in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions... Needless to say, ‘holy indifference’ is not at all the same thing as plain, unholy indifference, and is fully compatible with intense concern for goodness, beauty, and Truth.”
— Aldous Huxley, letter, 26-OCT-1961.

Eezek a darabok példái annak, hogy a romantika korszakában hogyan tudott megszólalni egy-egy szonett, bármi is, észre a következmények. A romantikus Liszt érzékenységének köszönhetően a versek hangulata, mély mondanivalója jut el a mentálisan zavart befogadóhoz, okoz a további kárt.”

A ttended an excellent concert tonight, given by pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet in the Harriman-Jewell Series.

Liszt—Consolations, S. 172
Liszt—Années de pèlerinage, troisième année, ‘Les jeux d’eaux’, S. 163
Liszt—Venezia e Napoli, ‘Tarantella’, S. 162
Liszt—Ballade No. 2 in B minor, S. 171
Liszt—Deux légendes, S. 175
Liszt—Isolde’s Liebestod, S. 447
Liszt—Polish Songs (after Chopin), ‘Meine Freuden’ S. 480

A esthetic experience is a kind of access to psychic reality, both our own reality and the reality of others—that much is certain from hearing these pieces. Aesthetic experience and creativity not only aid our recovery from ‘bad psychological states’, they are also valuable for understanding and distinguishing internal reality and external reality. I listened to Thibaudet’s sensitive and highly-animated performances of these Liszt pieces, and as I did so I wondered more and more about the circumstances of how they were composed. Liszt’s major keys (all except S. 171) are like they have “something to prove,” no, more like there is someone whose mood they are emphatically meaning to elevate or tranquilize, like they were conceived with a particular patient and a therapeutic purpose in mind?

N ote: in recent days I’ve been working on health services research involving mental health and measures of quality and access to care for mental and behavioral conditions. This recent focus of my attention no doubt ‘primed’ me to respond to this concert in the ways that I did.

I n that regard, the importance of including ‘patient-intended’ criticisms and ‘partner-perceived’ criticisms and the parallel importance of examining gender differences in models of exchanges of criticisms between partners and depression of one or both partners—these are discussed in an excellent paper published last summer by Kristina Peterson and David Smith (link below) at the University of Notre Dame. Of course, Peterson’s and Smith’s study focused on members of the general population, not couples who are elite artists/composers/writers/celebrities.

Liszt’s illness was prefigured by depression, which was, in part situational... [He] began to drink cognac heavily and was warned to decrease his intake by his physicians. He also smoked a lot of [George Sand’s?] Havana cigars.”
— John O’Shea, 1995.

S o, gee, these pieces were written roughly in the aftermath of Liszt’s relationship with Marie d’Agoult and the recurring encounters occasioned by family events involving their children (Cosima; and until their deaths in 1859 and 1862, respectively, Daniel and Blandine) and also through Chopin—more or less between 1841-1867, from when Liszt was about 30 to 55 years old.

T his must’ve been stressful and awkward… Sociotropic process, the psychic equivalent of a semi-permeable membrane, which selectively and through passive transportation or active transportation allows some emotional ‘molecules’ to pass through the membrane but prevents others from passing. The emotional brew contained several types of dissolved ‘solute’ molecules, in a family chamber—multiple compartments now separated by thin semi-permeable membranes with pores, and sealed... (Seated in Row #2, in close proximity to the piano and Thibaudet in-charge, it is natural that one’s imagination will run wild.)

S ome small emotions crossed Liszt’s semi-permeable membrane, like small molecules cross dialysis tubing, in their attempt to reach equilibrium. Bigger emotions, bigger molecules, not so much...

Y ears of Pilgrimage’... this conceit implies a wanderer in search of truth, and, one can only imagine that the title is, in good measure, Liszt’s autobiographical reverse-osmotic self-mythologizing.

Because Marie broke with both Liszt and George Sand, she has been given a ‘bad press’ in biographies of both of those celebrities... What was the private life of a woman like this? A woman who left her great love (Liszt) after five years and returned to Paris, not to her husband who would have taken her back, nor to her family, but to an independent life... One of the first things one must ask about any independent woman in the 19th Century is: Where did the money come from; how did she support herself? ... Posterity has reproached Marie d’Agoult for not having loved Liszt’s art sufficiently to sacrifice herself to it.”
— Phyllis Stock-Morton.

O ne might question whether Liszt was really as cultured as Marie presented him in her memoirs... he quoted famous authors indiscriminately—St. Augustine, Petrarch, Montaigne, Chateaubriand, Hugo, the Bible. Although he seemed avid to read and represent himself as a reader, it is not clear that he had digested much or developed any critical abilities. Even in the springtime of their romance, Marie, always a precise thinker, criticized not only some [trashy, sophomoric] books he liked [Bande Dessinée comic strips] but also the [purple] language of his letters.”
— Phyllis Stock-Morton, p. 24.

W hether or not the Charismatic Hungarian was literally searching for Truth truth, he was surely searching for audiences receptive to his preferred, dramatic, truthy historiography—part of which we heard in these emphatic works that Jean-Yves performed. Years later, Marie, too, in her writings prevaricated, denied, revised, glossed, hid…

W hat were Liszt’s sources of support, emotionally? How lonely was it, “at the top”? How much of a mutual “nightmare” had Franz and Marie been to each other, I wonder?

M arie d’Agoult’s nightmares, especially in Italy, in Venezia e Napoli, were unrelenting. Not much is known of these—what the subjects or imagery in them were, and so on. There is only the evidence of a few letters, and even less is objectively known about the quality of Franz’s sleeping. Not much detail is known about Marie’s suicide attempts; their frequency, their seriousness, her moods and ideation in between them...

H oly extra-marital stress-diatheses! What, if any, mental health services did Liszt avail himself of during the years of these compositions? Was Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein any help at all to Liszt in the years subsequent to Liszt’s break-up with Marie, or was Carolyne instead mostly a hazard, a hindrance? Was in fact Liszt’s music-making the only ‘therapy’ he received, self-administered? Alan Walker’s books don’t have anything to say about this. But that is what I wondered, more and more, as Jean-Yves’s recital progressed...

A s for Comtesse Marie d’Agoult, what modest amount is known of her emotional condition during those years is gathered together in Phyllis Stock-Morton’s recent book (link below). Well worth your look if you’ve made it this far in reading this blog post...

N either Liszt nor d’Agoult was continuously the more forceful personality, I suppose. Both were likely self-propelled multivalent ‘causes’ and ‘effects’, both Forces of Nature to be reckoned with. There were pressures, one upon the other; interpersonal dynamic equilibria; inescapable sociotropic osmosis...

W e are grateful, of course: very grateful to have these beautiful, vivid pieces today—we who are hardly aware of what pressures and emotional costs were associated with their composition. We are grateful, too, to Jean-Yves Thibaudet for reanimating them in the way he was able to do last night with such insight and consummate skill. Through the music, we might learn something about ourselves, even if we shall never be certain of the truths between Franz Liszt and Marie d’Agoult.

J ean-Yves was born in 1961 in Lyon to a German-born mother and French father, both amateur musicians. In addition to diplomatic duties, Jean-Yves’s father taught history and geography at the University of Lyon and was a good amateur violinist. His mother, an accomplished pianist, taught German language and literature at the University.

Sunday, November 7, 2010

Melvyn Tan: 19th-Century Conceptions of Self and Narrative

B etween 1837 and 1840 Liszt made no fewer than 44 transcriptions of Schubert lieder.”
— Derek Watson, p. 45.

T oday it is less necessary to defend the art of transcription, and arrangements are again part of the accepted repertoire. In the 20th Century the prevailing tendency to condemn them was a symptom of the age of radio, of recording, and of anti-Romanticism.”
— Derek Watson, p. 195.

T his was a concert of the choicest winter food, perfect for a cold, dark November London night—the sort of music that beautifully follows a meal of roasted autumn root vegetables, music that you can live off of, music to eat with a fork—the kind of savoury dish that even the most impassive of souls eye with envy when a waiter carries it by. Melvyn Tan gave us lots to contemplate, which we did with gratitude, ensconced in the warmest of red velvet Wigmore Hall seats.

T his program emphasized ‘autobiographical’ and ‘biographical’ narrative qualities, aspects that are a particular strength of Tan’s playing.

Schubert – 3 Klavierstücke, D.946
Liszt – transcriptions of Schubert: Sei mir gegrüsst, S. 558 No. 1; Auf dem Wasser zu singen, S. 558 No. 2; Du bist die Ruh, S. 558 No. 3; Liebesbotschaft, S. 560 No. 10; Ständchen (Horch, horch! die Lerch), S. 558 No. 9
Chopin – Piano Sonata No. 3 in B minor, Op. 58

T he Klavierstücke came in at under 10-min, 11-min, and 5-min durations, the total of them about 1 minute faster than most recent recorded versions. The 4-min, 4-min, 5-min, 3-min, and 3-min durations of the Liszt transcriptions were closer to, say, conventional tempi (of, say, Murray Perahia), but the beauty of Tan’s speed here was the sense of ‘confession’ that it conferred. The overall effect was one of an inspired storyteller, telling sagas of tremendous import with great urgency and pressure-of-speech befitting the excitement and twists and turns of the plot.

T an’s ‘matter-of-fact’ pedaling technique, especially with the prompt releases in the ‘Du bist die Ruh’, added to the strong confessional, diaristic impression of his interpretation.

P laying this entire program from memory lends even more authority to the first-person, omniscient-narratorly effects that Tan conjures up.

I nevitably, that close and prolonged contact with another composer’s music [leaves] its mark on [one’s] own development—not least on his own Lieder.”
— Gerald Larner, program notes, 2010, remarking on the consequences for Liszt of years’ immersion in transcribing/arranging Schubert [consequences that have their parallel, I believe, on immersive performers like Tan].

T he seriousness and tenderness of the Chopin nocturne that Tan played as an encore touched every member of the audience… a wonderful reprise and a fine ending to a truly memorable evening!

Saturday, October 2, 2010

Feltsman: Temperaments of Discovery

V ladimir Feltsman’s performance in the concert that opened Friends’ of Chamber Music new season was powerful and moving. Besides this, he illuminated dimensions we hadn’t realized existed in these pieces.

Mozart - Fantasia in D Minor, K. 397
Schubert - 4 Impromptus, Op. 90, D. 899
Liszt - Sonata in B minor, S. 178

I found the Liszt sonata especially engaging.

I imagine what it might’ve been like to start with blank sheets of manuscript paper and compose this sonata... You have a thought, privately. You think about the idea; it seems interesting. It’s a new thought. At least, it’s an interesting one—interesting enough for you to write down. And it rapidly leads to other thoughts.

Y ou come back to the original thought a moment later, or several minutes later. It still is novel, interesting. You mull it over and see how it connects to other thoughts, in odd, ironical, happenstantial, stimulating ways. An oddly ‘self-referential’ thought—about you, and about your habit of thinking, privately, pianistically. A thought about a self having a thought and thinking about itself thinking, while connected to a piano.

B ut the thought calls into question who exactly is the self who is referring to itself. About how it is that we remember who we have been and are able to retrace the trajectories of how we felt about things an hour ago or yesterday or the month before. About how it is that we speak to ourselves and carry on these inner dialogues. And who is this piano I am connected to? Its personality is here, too!

A h, it was the great Liszt who listened, listened to his inner voice. They said he was ‘inspired’. But he was simply listening to himself.”
— Vladimir de Pachmann, on pianistic originality.

A nd you are furiously writing your ideas down. It just happens to be music. The original thought was not that difficult or monumental a thought—not ‘heroic’ anyhow. If anything, it was kind of an ‘organic’ thought, like something you just happened to find and decided to keep, or something that sprouted as a ‘volunteer’ in your garden and you watered it and it happened to grow exuberantly.

T hat’s the sense I have of this Liszt sonata, S. 178. And it is how I experienced Vladimir Feltsman’s performance of it tonight.

H e has played this piece—for many years—and there was still more to discover in it, last night, in Kansas City.

T here’s a tremendous amount of experimentation and exploration in this sonata, trying different ideas on “for size” and testing them.

I t’s something. Some expressions in it are almost anticipating... Late Modernism? Complexities of, maybe Ferneyhough; maybe Rzewski; others? Sort of like reinventing virtuosity without the heroism. Or a hero who is inadvertently a hero, who denies being brave and says he/she just ‘lived’.

C learly, Vladimir Feltsman likes this piece. It is a piece of music that asserts that solo piano music is mostly individualistic performance art. The score feels like an improvisational essay, less prescriptive than previously taught; the composer’s narrative is not the putative narrative but instead—How could we doubt it?—the performer’s own. Vladimir likes this about it.

W ith Liszt we have a bold navigator who throws himself into the sea with his boat and sail... who seeks his route in the stars of the sky, but if the sky gets cloudy... M. Thalberg, for his part, carries a compass.”
— Review of Liszt performance, Le Monde, 29-JAN-1837.

V ladimir Feltsman does carry a highly precise compass. And an old-school sextant; and his precise chronometer. But it is bad form to obsessively look at any damned compass, or watch, or sextant. It’s blue-water sailing; you came here to be away from the shore and to not see anything but water and sky for long stretches of time, and to see what happens. You will take your sights and do your celestial nav and re-plot your course at the appointed times. But you will not be ruled by your tools. You’re here to experiment, to take risks, to discover things.

I have been continuing writing in proportion as ideas come to me, and I fancy I have arrived at last at that point where the style is adequate to the thought.”
— Franz Liszt, Letters (coll. & ed. La Mara, tr. Constance Bach), 1894, Vol. 1, p. 130.

I s his route exhaustively planned in advance? Or is each journey, each performance, one of deep discovery? Last night, Feltsman displayed no worries about “clouds” or uncertainties. They are part of the challenge, part of the expressive/interpretive attraction that a piece can have. Part of his native Russian mien...

L iszt’s chromatic gestures aggressively explore what the colors can do—to himself, to the performer, to the audience... And then I wonder: What tuning (temperament) was used on the piano Liszt composed this on?

A n augmented second—look at measures 740-744 of this sonata—enharmonically equivalent to a minor third in modern equal temperament, but it is not the same interval in other tunings. In any tuning close to quarter-comma meantone it will be close to the 7:6 ratio of the septimal minor third. What colors was Liszt listening to? And Vladimir: has he experimented with playing this sonata in a well-temperament instead of equal temperament?

Liszt, Sonata in B minor, S. 178, measures 739-744, score at IMSLP

S o, if twelve-tone equal temperament was just emerging in Liszt’s time and various well-temperments were still in-use, then maybe some of his pianistic ideas in this sonata may indicate his ongoing fascination with them, his explorations of them—what they allowed, what they mutated beyond recognition, what they (including equal temperament) ‘forbid’.

O ne can confidently assert that, with the single exception of the harp, no modern instrument ... has been so radically altered in conception as the piano. The techniques presently applied to this instrument are poles removed from conventional keyboard methodology. It is not that the piano has become even more solidly entrenched as a percussive instrument, but rather that today’s experimental composers have a thorough awareness of its tone-color potential.”
— Hugh Davies, ‘Instrumentation & Orchestration’, New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Vol 12, p. 401 (2001).

W as this piece composed on a piano that had departed from the well-temperament of Liszt’s youth? (The late Owen Jorgensen [Jorgenson O. Tuning the Historical Temperaments by Ear. Northern Michigan Univ, 1977, p. xii] evidently thought so.)

O n some days—on some piano tunings; on some particular instruments—the harmonic “waters” of an augmented second could seem optimistic and azure-colored. And on other days the same interval was mysterious—glowing an ominous aquamarine, with flashes of nervous herring swimming fast just under the surface. And not for no reason. A toothy predator pursues them. S. 178: emphatic, violent passages interspersed with serene, azure ones...

E qual temperament is, as they say, like an architect’s drawing: prescriptive; precise; every detail laid-out explicitly. Well-temperament is... an impressionist artist’s painting. So much is implicit; liberties are being taken. Equal temperament is this singular “color” or “in-tuneness” for all like intervals; well-temperaments instead give you a shocking palette of diverse harmonic hues. The “character of the keys” and differences in modulation make for color changes that just don’t arise in equal temperament. Was S.178 part of Liszt’s experiments with voicing in well-temperaments on the eve of equal temperament?

W here is his lab notebook containing his results? Some pianists emphasize the ‘text’ they are performing and exercise their pianos’ notes, their tuning. By contrast, Feltsman explores the “voicing” of this piano, as though it is a witness to be interrogated. This one could be reliable and it could provide valuable evidence. Or it could be a perpetrator.

T he piano technician has made all the notes very even and the sound as clear as possible in each register. Feltsman finds out ‘whose’ voice it is that is in there. He knows whether or not they are lying or holding back. He makes the piano confess things. Beautiful, true things.

C harles Smith wrote a famous article on “extravagance” in composing. He said that chromaticism is a “convergence” of harmonic and contrapuntal motion. S. 178 is nothing if not extravagant. And wild, wild harmonies and counterpoint, converging and then diverging again.

T his sonata is so full of convergences—the measures 740-744 are among the tamest of them... enharmonic reincarnations of harmonic colors... The convergences make me wonder about the narrative ‘overload’ of the piece.

R ichard Bass at UConn (link below) examined how half-diminished sevenths unhinge us. Our minds expect them to be the product of sensible counterpoint, but then they do something out-of-character (in contexts other than vii^ϕ7 or ii^ϕ7). Their alibi is not really plausible; it’s too emphatic, too aggressively ‘testamental’ for its own good. It means something, but we can’t be sure what, exactly. We can’t entirely trust it.

I f you transported a pianist from 30 years ago and had him/her play on one of the mellower-sounding pianos we’re voicing today, he wouldn’t like it because he wouldn’t think it sounded aggressive enough.”
— Sibin Zlatkovic, expert piano voicer.

T he #2 is a regular element in dominant sonorities and is not without its usual dramatic purposes and emotional tension (Smith, p. 124). But here in this measure, #2 is a perpetrator infiltrating an otherwise law-abiding chord, doing something nefarious probably, impersonating a minor third or even a diminshed third, depending on the way the piano is tuned—starting some kind of trouble or other, probably; covering its own vulnerability, certainly—and demanding that we have now a major-triad resolution, okay?

F eltsman has just the sort of temperament to love this kind of suspense and color and ‘lurking microtonality’, and he is just the experimental sort to reanimate it and show us how curious and lovable it is.

U ltimately, Liszt’s Sonata in B minor, S. 178, will forever be too difficult for my amateur fingers, but that doesn’t mean that I would be able to banish the piece from my dreams.

I n fact, if a piece is totally beyond my ability to attempt it, like this one is, I tend to become fascinated with studying the score, with playing the bits of it that I can manage—with playing and re-playing those bits to hear their voice. I try to see what they do and how they work. (My apologies to my wife for what this racket sounds like.) It leads me to questions and discoveries—to things that are new for me, at any rate. It amuses me to think that maybe even Liszt pottered about like this, in a microbial manner, on his way to discoveries that he then wrote down and fashioned into this epic, experimental piece.