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Franz Liszt has been cancelled by the world’s orchestras, probably for something he said on social media. Seriously, when was the last time you saw a Liszt orchestral work on a concert programme, other than the two piano concertos? Probably not in the present century.
Yet Liszt was regarded in his lifetime and long after his death in 1886 as an orchestral composer of consequence, equal to Berlioz in colour, control and vivid imagination. Nikisch and Mahler conducted his tone poems, Richard Strauss imitated them and Arnold Schoenberg studied them for post-tonal solutions. So why is Liszt so lamentably unperformed these days?
Clues can be found in Gergely Madaras’s passionate new recording of the Faust Symphony with the royal philharmonic orchestra of Liège in Belgium. Madaras, UK based, is Hungarian to his fingertips. He brings out the paprika in the score, dated 1854, along with the theatrical drama that Liszt invests in Goethe’s over-worked story of the man who sold his soul to the devil.
Few of Liszt’s works display a greater array of evidence of Wagner’s debt to his mentor, from Tannhäuser and Rheingold anticipations at the outset to Tristan intimations in the finale. You could fill a notebook here with the ideas Wagner filched from Liszt. The trouble is, Wagner made better of them. By the time the Faust Symphony reaches an hour, it starts to feel longer than Parsifal.
Liszt is a tremendous orchestrator and a terrible self-editor. If only someone had shouted ‘cut!’ Madaras and his Belgians tighten up the untidier passages and exert a constant fascination by playing up the Wagner references. A performance of this calibre would go down really well in a summer festival before an audience at leisure. But you can see why busy urban orchestras, sensitive to their time-conscious listeners, put Liszt on the cancel list. So much good music, so little common sense.
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