Franz Liszt (1811-1886)

Sonata in b minor (1853)
Les Préludes (1854; arranged for two pianos by Liszt)

Richard Wagner (1813-1883)

Overture to Tannhäuser (1845)
Isolde’s Love-death, from Tristan und Isolde (1859)
Prelude to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1861)
   (arranged for two pianos by Max Reger)

Liszt and Wagner: Musical Outlaws and Inlaws

On this very day, June 1, one hundred and sixty five years ago (1835), Franz Liszt boarded a public coach from Paris bound for Basel. He was twenty-three, and was moving to Switzerland to begin a new life together with his sweetheart, twenty-nine-year-old countess Marie d’Agoult. The two had been illicit lovers off and on for about two years. Marie, pregnant with their first child, left her husband and daughter to join Liszt.

By that ripe old age, Liszt was already the most dazzling piano virtuoso in the world. At age 12 he was kissed by Beethoven. At 13, he was the darling of Paris: the piano maker Érard arranged a concert tour for him. At 14 he played in London for King George IV and wrote his first opera. By 18, having concertized extensively in France, Switzerland, and Britain, he was the toast of Europe, and was already recognized as one of the most famous stars in the world. Liszt invented the solo piano recital (turning the piano sideways to the audience, dressing in black, with rock-star shoulder-length hair). And his extraordinary talent was matched by incredible charisma. When he walked on stage to perform, instead of flowers, women sometimes threw jewelry and intimate clothes on stage. They threw flowers, too, and there was usually a delay while the bouquets were removed from the pianos. In Paris he had already begun close friendships with Hector Berlioz, Frederic Chopin, George Sand (Liszt introduced Chopin and Sand), Delacroix, Mendelssohn, Victor Hugo, Paganini and countless others. But Liszt was just getting started.

He and Marie and their newborn traveled to Italy, stopping in Milan, Venice, Florence, Rome, and eventually Como, where they had their second child, Cosima. Cosima would grow up to marry Hans von Bülow, the conductor/pianist (and great grandfather of the notorious Claus). Around this time, Liszt began a series of concert tours the likes of which the world had never seen. He went everywhere: from Edinborough to Madrid, from Rome to Constantinople, from Baghdad to Kiev. Had he never played a note he would have gone down in history as one of the world’s great travelers. And he met everyone: Schumann, Brahms, Grieg, Fauré, Bruckner, Tchaikovsky, Balzac, Vigny, Dumas, Franck, Saint-Saens, Rubinstein, Debussy: Liszt knew them all. When in Rome he often stayed at the Vatican, naturally. Popes and royals and the leading artists and scientists of the day were all in his friendly circle.

Reports of Liszt’s sight reading abilities are mythic — or at least, they would be were they not unanimously confirmed by everyone who saw him in action. Felix Mendelssohn brought Liszt the manuscript of his piano concerto in g minor, barely legible, but Liszt rattled it off "in the most perfect manner, better than anybody else could play it." Edvard Grieg had the same experience with his newly composed violin sonata: "he was literally all over the piano at once, without missing a note, and how he played!" And Brahms had a memorable encounter when he paid Liszt a visit in Weimar in 1853. Liszt walked into the salon and saw a pile of unpublished manuscripts on the piano. To Brahms he said, "We are very interested in your compositions whenever you are ready and feel inclined to play them." But Brahms, who was certainly no slouch, became very nervous, and could not be persuaded to go near the piano. So Liszt went over, picked up the untidy manuscript for the scherzo in E-flat, placed it on the music desk, and said "Well, then, I shall have to play." And not only did he play the piece masterfully, but he kept up a running commentary on the music. Brahms was stunned. Afterwards, Liszt played his newly composed Sonata in b minor (yes, tonight’s solo piece). During a slow passage he looked into the audience and saw Brahms, sound asleep, snoring away. They didn’t get along too well after that.

Liszt’s career as a composer had extraordinary breadth: he wrote over 1300 pieces of music (one wonders how he had the time just to scribble it all down). As a teacher he was unequalled: Europe was his university, and he left a legacy of over 400 prominent students. Even today, it’s not hard to play "six degrees of separation": my teacher was a student of a student of a student of Liszt, and I can trace multiple paths back. So many students flocked to his studio in Weimar that the city passed a law mandating a fine of five marks if anyone was caught practicing with open windows.

After a tepid marriage to Bülow, daughter Cosima (remember her?) fell head over heels for none other than Richard Wagner, a musical and literary titan in his own right. Wagner was, needless to say, a close friend of Liszt’s (the two were nearly the same age). It’s hard to picture: the Liszts and the Wagners, spending Christmases and Easters together, on family vacations in Italy, but they did. Liszt was a huge promoter of Wagner’s music, often bailing him out when he ran into political or monetary troubles. Which was indeed often: it cost a fortune to put on an opera, especially Wagner’s operas, and many of them were bankrupt productions. That Wagner produced many operas in exile (he kept getting thrown out of Germany) did not simplify matters. Fortunately, "mad" King Ludwig of Bavaria (the same fellow who built the "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" castle, Neuchwanstein) was often available to bail Wagner out. Much later in life, it was Ludwig who ponied up the money to pay for Bayreuth, which was a bit like the Wagnerian version of Tanglewood. But it was also a sort of precursor to George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch: a state-of-the-art production facility, with the best stage technology and creative talent available.

The tip of the iceberg of these two extraordinary, complex musical lives might be glimpsed in the way they went out. In 1883, after one of those Liszt/Wagner family Christmases in Venice, Wagner died of a heart attack. Cosima held him in her arms and didn’t let go for more than a day before they were separated. He was buried in Bayreuth. A few years later, in 1886, Liszt travelled to Bayreuth to hear Tristan, and after one evening’s performance, developed pneumonia. A few days later, he died in bed from heart failure and other complications, across the street from Wagner’s house, and with a flock of devoted students close at hand. Liszt, too, is buried in Bayreuth.

sonata in b minor; les préludes

Liszt’s Sonata is a humongous, sprawling epic, one of the most imposing and monumental pieces in the entire solo piano literature. The piece evokes superlatives (a vast, integrated, radical architecture; an enormously rich dramatic tapestry; powerful, eloquent, dazzling, other-worldly, lofty, a deluge of sound & emotion without rival in its day, stunningly original; nothing more exciting is there in the literature of the piano...). It was written in 1853 when Liszt was 42 and really hitting his stride as a composer. He dedicated the piece to Schumann, who in turn, had inscribed his Fantasie to Liszt. Liszt loved Schumann’s Fantasie. And what did Schumann think of Liszt’s Sonata? He never heard it. By the time the manuscript reached him, Schumann had been committed to an insane asylum.

One of Liszt’s compositional innovations was the use of thematic transformation as an organizing concept for a piece. The sonata exemplifies that technique. It is built from a handful of motives that are ingeniously stretched, transformed and woven together into many episodes, packaged into one sweeping work. The first 18 bars state the three tunes from which the rest of the piece is built: a low, descending scale; a bold melody in double octaves; and a sinister little left-hand melody. It’s fun to imagine that Liszt has just been handed these three puzzlers (he plays them for the crowd), and then begins to swirl them together into an incredible improvisation, running the emotional and compositional gamut, with fugues, chorales, recitatives, sexy melodies, wild arpeggios and virtuoso tricks of all kinds. The "sinister" bass melody is cast into major and becomes a sensuous soprano tune; the murky descending scale and the octave melody return as a flood of octaves at the end of the piece, and a lot of other amazing stuff happens in between. It’s a blockbuster.

Les Préludes was written around the same timeas the sonata. It even begins in much the same spirit, with those spooky pizzicato octaves, but goes into very different directions. This is one of a dozen symphonic "tone poems" written by Liszt (others included Hamlet, the Battle of the Huns, and works of that sort, or pieces like the Mephisto Waltz or Gnomenreigen). As such it represents one of Liszt’s other innovations: "program" music (a piece with some story or literary theme in mind), in which a single poetic movement tells the tale. In this case, the "story" is a heady poem by Lamartine, which essentially says that the episodes of life are but preludes to the numinous beyond. You wouldn’t guess it from this riproaring music. Liszt always pushed the edge, and strove to write what he called the "music of the future," so appropriately enough, this piece really got popular when it was used as the theme music for Flash Gordon.

the wagner overtures

In Liszt’s day, of course, great orchestral music was often played on two pianos. That was certainly true of Les Préludes, which he arranged himself. There are many accounts of dynamic duos like Liszt and Saint-Saens performing this transcription for salon parties. Must have been fun. Liszt also made many arrangements of Wagner’s works, but they’re all for solo piano. Duets and duo-piano versions of the Wagner were not created until 1914, and that huge task was undertaken by Max Reger at the behest of Peters, the music publisher. These arrangements seem to have gone out of print around the time they went into print, and are not really mentioned in the catalogs of Reger’s works. Nor are they in any American library we could find. We finally obtained a copy from the library of the Max Reger Institute in Karstadt. It seems unlikely that these have ever been performed in the US, and the arrangements themselves are sprawling, very demanding, and a gas to play. First class piano music.

We are playing three of Reger’s four remarkable arrangements (we’re skipping the Valkyries).

Tannhäuser is the story of a minstrel torn between his sexual love for Venus and his more noble love for the self-effacing Elisabeth. Basically he has a good roll in the hay with Venus, brags about it, regrets it, tries to make amends to the sweet and true Elisabeth, and dies trying. And that pretty much ends the opera.

Tristan and Isolde is a particularly personal expression. Wagner was in the midst of a crummy marriage (not to Cosima, but to Minna, who had no interest at all in music) and he wrote: "Since I have never in my life enjoyed the true happiness of life, I want to erect a further monument to this most beautiful of dreams..."  It’s about Love. This is the Arthurian romance of the lovers Tristan, the knight, and Isolde, the Irish princess. In a bloody battle, Tristan kills Isolde’s husband-to-be, Morold. But during the fighting, Tristan was struck by Morold’s sword and suffered a wound that would not heal. Isolde learns of this, hunts down Tristan, and plans to kill him in his sleep, but he wakes and their eyes meet, and... — kismet. They fall madly, tragically, in love. There’s a separation, a duel, a betrayal, another nasty wound, and a long-awaited rendezvous as Tristan and Isolde struggle get back together. And that brings us to the liebestod, where this music occurs. Unable to bear the suffering and longing anymore, Tristan rips off his bandages and bleeds to death. His servant commits suicide in despair. Isolde finally arrives but too late, and throws herself in tears on Tristan. Miraculously, he wakes up — but only for an augenblick, just an instant. And then he dies again. Isolde gazes forlornly at him, and she dies, too. That’s the moment this music expresses.

Die Meistersinger is sort of a companion tale to Tannhäuser. It’s the story of a guild of medieval master singers who gather for a singing competition. The good guy, von Stolzing, is tutored in song by the wise old Hans Sachs and hopes to win the competition as well as the heart of the lovely Eva. The bad guy, Beckmesser, steals von Stolzing’s lyrics. In the end, von Stolzing wins the prize, impresses Eva, Sachs looks on benevolently, a la Obi-Wan Kenobi, everybody sings merrily, and nobody dies. It’s a happy opera, and this music, the prelude, collects all of the best, sunny tunes in a nice, tidy, not-too-longwinded overture.

the pianists

Michael Hawley is a professor at the Media Lab. He directs research on embedded intelligence (in toys, homes, and people), and leads a program of high-tech expeditions in interesting places.

Mary Farbood is pursuing graduate work in music and technology at the Media Lab. A Julliard-trained pianist and Harvard-trained computer scientist, she recently was one of the winners of MIT’s concerto competition.

thanks

Thanks to the Media Laboratory community: where else at MIT would you encounter spontaneous concerts like this one? And thanks especially to Chris Newell and Hayat Prentice who both helped above and beyond the call in pulling this together.

Please note, the atrium is a noisy public space and was not designed for concerts; we hope you’ll still be able to enjoy the music. Seating is limited; if you can’t find a good chair, you could consider a brief career as a page turner.  See Prof. Hawley for details.

Thank you for coming.

Michael Hawley
mike@media.mit.edu