Liszt

Abstract

MORE THAN fifty years after Newman, the most respected critic of his time, wrote those words, it has to be acknowledged that Liszt remains a controversial figure. Argument certainly rumbles over his standing as a composer, though the scholarly, evangelical work of the musicologist Alan Walker and the composer Humphrey Searle has steadily consolidated a growing body of interest in Liszt’s music, across the whole range of his career, from the early virtuoso transcriptions, through his mature works, like the two concertos and symphonies, to the intriguingly forward-looking pieces of his old age.

Musical biography has always tended to the diffusion of a romantic legend rather than to an impartial record of the sober truth. For the musical world is divided into clans, and each clan swears such unquestioning loyalty to its adopted chieftain that it is almost as much as the outsider’s life is worth to hint that the Big Chief may have had a human as well as a heroic or a sacred side to him.

(Ernest Newman, The Man Liszt, London, 1934, p. I)