Concerto Guide: Franz Liszt, Piano Concerto No. 1 in E-flat major

It is hard to place this composition, chronologically. According to Wikipedia:

Franz Liszt composed his Piano Concerto No. 1 in E-flat major, S.124 over a 26-year period; the main themes date from 1830, while the final version dates 1849. It premiered in Weimar on February 17, 1855, with Liszt at the piano and Hector Berlioz conducting.

Do we date it from when when the first themes were sketched, in which case it would be among the very first romantic concertos, even pre-dating Berlioz' Harold en Italie of 1834? Or do we date it from when the final version was completed in 1849, in which case it comes after the Schumann Piano Concerto and the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto? Or from the premiere in 1855? Isn't it odd that the premiere occurred so late?

Liszt's was a complex and contradictory career. He was, at the same time, both the greatest virtuoso (on the piano, at least) of his time and an avant-garde composer (again, of his time). Interestingly enough, it was the radical nature of his themes and harmonies with their stress on the tritone and chromatic scale, that rescued his compositions from the mere shallow brilliance of the style brillant of Thalberg and Kalkbrenner. As far as the concerto goes, around the 1840s the form began to absorb that of the more-prestigious symphony, producing a "symphonic concerto". One of the symptoms of this process is the appearance of a scherzo between the slow movement and the finale. We see this in the Liszt First Piano Concerto:

1. Allegro maestoso
2. Quasi adagio
3. Allegretto vivace - Allegro animato
4. Allegro marziale animato

Going back to the genesis of this concerto, Liszt's early career was as a touring virtuoso, only the second in music history, following the example of Paganini. But by the late 1840s this was beginning to pall and in September 1847 he essentially quit his career as a piano virtuoso in favor of spending time on composition. So why didn't he complete this piano concerto when it would have been useful to him? The answer might be that Liszt actually had no need of an orchestra on stage with him! With his original compositions and a host of transcriptions and arrangements, he was entirely self-sufficient! By 1855, and the premiere of this concerto, he was appearing more as a composer than as a pianist.

The concerto, while containing a fiendishly difficult virtuoso piano part, has a lot of other interesting features. One particularly admired by Bartók is the use of the cyclic principle: themes return in varied form throughout the work. The finale in particular is a triumph of virtuoso variation technique with its use of the four themes of the Adagio and Scherzo (third movement), transformed in different rhythms and tempi. The main theme of the first movement also returns in the finale to frame the whole work. The textures are also remarkably varied, not only in the polyrhythms of the piano part, but also in the use of solo orchestral instruments in dialogue with the piano. My favorite part is the trio of piano, flute and triangle that forms part of the third movement.

Now let's listen to a particularly stunning version of the piece. This is Martha Argerich delivering a ferocious performance with Christoph von Dohnányi conducting the RSO in Berlin in 1981:

Glinka on Liszt

Mikhail Glinka (1804 - 1857), the first widely known Russian composer who wrote A Life for the Tsar once commented on Franz Liszt (1811 - 1886), the great piano virtuoso that

...sometimes Liszt played magnificently, like no one else in the world, but other times intolerably, in a highly affected manner, dragging tempi and adding to the works of others, even to those of Chopin, Beethoven, Weber and Bach a lot of embellishments of his own that were often tasteless, worthless and meaningless.

Taruskin in the Oxford History of Western Music attributes this to a change in musical taste that was taking place. He links Glinka's remarks to the fact that he spent a year in Berlin studying with Siegfried Dehn, an "apostle of the new 'classicism' ". In turn, he attributes to this new attitude the removal from the training of musicians of the ability to improvise. Liszt, for example, often ended his concerts with an extemporized fantasia, but pianists of later times no longer improvise (or only very few).

I'm sure that there is some truth to this, but doesn't Taruskin prove too much? Is it not entirely possible that sometimes Liszt did indeed add tasteless, worthless and meaningless embellishments to the music of the composers listed? Taruskin sees the 19th century as a time when the classical repertoire became fixed and 'inviolate' with a loss of spontaneity. While that is also largely true, I think we can see it from a different angle.

Personally, if I go to a concert or listen to a recording of Chopin, Beethoven or Bach, I do expect to hear a more or less true account of the score. I also expect to hear the performer making the score come alive with dynamics, phrasing, articulation--the thousand indefinable things that make for a great performance. The score is nothing but a set of instructions and a kind of graphic representation of a performance. The notes on the staff are both. Things like dynamics (ppp or fff) or articulations like accents or staccati, are instructions and exactly how and how much are indefinite. A score tells us a great deal, but also leaves a great deal up to interpretation.

What I don't expect to hear at a concert or on a recording is the performer's embellishments of Chopin, Beethoven or Bach. Each of these composers arrived at a final (or reasonably so) version of the piece which they sent to the publisher. Beethoven was known to complain that, despite all his care, the published string quartets contain hosts of misprints (which could include missing or incorrect notes, misplaced or incorrect phrasing, accents, accidentals and so on). The obvious ones have been corrected over the years, but some may still remain! Beethoven wanted performers to have a correct version of the score. This they could then bring alive for performance.

Improvisation and embellishment are of a different order, I feel certain. Chopin, Beethoven and Bach could all improvise, Bach and Beethoven with a skill that we can barely imagine. But their improvisations were of a different aesthetic quality and category to the pieces they took the trouble to write down clearly and carefully and send to a publisher. Those works, I'm also pretty certain, they did not intend to be subject to embellishments that might on occasion be "tasteless, worthless and meaningless."

Here as an example of Liszt's more extemporaneous style, is his Fantasia and Fugue on B.A.C.H. That is to say, using the notes that correspond to BACH in German nomenclature: Bb, A, C, B natural.

Now do you really want to hear him or anyone else putting some music by Bach through the same kind of treatment? Do you want to hear him Liszticizing something like this:

Where is the room for embellishment? In music this highly and beautifully organized, I doubt adding notes would improve it in the slightest. It would be like dressing up a fine roast chicken with catsup and marshmallows.