FRANZ LISZT: The Virtuoso Years, 1811-1847

by Alan Walker ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1982

Music professor Walker (McMaster U., Ontario) begins with a detailed, rather prissy tirade on ""the confused history of Liszt biography hitherto""; and, throughout, his first volume of a projected three-volume Life-and-Work is marred by the relentless twitting of other Liszt biographers, along with Walker's tootings of his own scholarly horn. Still, despite its pedantries (and its occasional tendency toward whitewash), this study of Liszt's early years is impeccably, exhaustively researched, lucidly organized, and (for the most part) crisply written--in the best British-toned-biography tradition. Walker examines all the evidence re Liszt's ancestry, discounting all legends of ""noble blood."" He follows the young piano prodigy (with his sympathetically drawn promoter-father) from Hungary to Vienna to Paris--stressing his early religiosity, his intellectual curiosity, and his early compositions (Walker finds them unfairly ignored) . . . as well as the more familiar matters of celebrity and keyboard virtuosity. (With reference to the ""breakthrough"" Studies of 1838-39, Walker extolls the Lisztian transformation of technique into art: ""What harsh words have been uttered against Liszt's virtuosity, usually by those who could not match it!"") He tends to see Liszt as a victim--of his fickle colleagues (Berlioz, Chopin), of his own success, above all of mistress Marie d'Agoult, that ""joyless, brooding personality"" whose view of Liszt is entirely discounted (sometimes unconvincingly). Also, in a similar rein of faintly priggish defensiveness, Walker goes overboard in emphasizing, re Lola Montez et al., that ""hot a single piece of solid evidence has ever come to light to prove that Liszt's connection with any of these women was sexual."" Nonetheless, if the ever-admiring Liszt portrait here is sometimes less-than-persuasive, Walker lays out all the relevant evidence so clearly that readers can draw their own conclusions. And, while the narrative remains at a psychological distance, its musicological focus is steady--from influences (Czerny, Paganini, Hungarian Gypsy music) to Liszt's arrival as the ""first modern pianist,"" complete with musical examples of his then-unorthodox fingerwork. Perhaps hot in every sense the definitive Liszt biography, then--but no one is likely to come doser; and as both narrative and scholarship, Walker's treatment is engrossing, even for those who might hot agree with all his emphases.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1982

ISBN: 0801494214

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1982

Categories: NONFICTION