To a composer who brought him his latest work: ‘Your music contains many new and
beautiful things, but the beautiful ones are not new, and the new ones are not beautiful.’
To a female pupil who excused her poor performance of a Bach fugue by saying that she
had been too busy travelling: ‘Well, then, you must have left some of the music behind
you on your journey, since I didn’t hear all the notes. You’d better telegraph for them at
once!’
‘To play Beethoven requires more technique than ideally belongs to it.’
‘Schumann must be well phrased in every detail. He must be played firmly and
resolutely and be rhythmically well articulated. With him the ritenutos should be just as
effective as the accelerandos and animatos are with Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn flows
along clearly and quickly, Schumann breathes, but Chopin has more appreciable stature.’
When a pupil played clattering scales, Liszt imitated the appropriate sound, saying,
‘Don’t wash your mouth out’, and when Amy Fay made too much movement with one of
her hands, he told her. ‘Don’t make omelette!’
Working methods
Liszt’s working methods when composing for the piano are known to some extent.
‘An eyewitness account from the thirties tells us that Liszt generally gave a few hours a
day to composing. He worked directly at the piano, with writing materials arranged on a
small table near the keyboard. While he was George Sand’s guest at Nohant, she
described his labor on a new work in her diary entry of 3 June 1837:
“Perhaps it is some compositional task that he tried out in fragments at the piano; beside
him is his pipe, his ruled paper and quill pens. It seems to me that while passing before
the piano he must be churning out these capricious phrases unconsciously, obedient to his
instinct of feeling rather than to the labor of reason. But these rapid and quixotic
melodies affect me like the cracking of a ship beaten by the tempest, and I feel my
entrails rend at the thought of what I suffered when I was living within that storm.”
In Weimar Liszt continued to compose with a piano nearby, at least while writing works
for that instrument. In the Lehman MS he had inserted keyboard fingerings with
whatever writing implement he was using at the time for other purposes. In all stages of
the evolution of the Sonata, Liszt seemingly tested his progress by playing it at the piano.
Liszt generally worked on several projects at once. Evidence of this appears in his
letters, perhaps to such an obvious degree that the point has been overlooked. Even so it
is a valuable insight into the composer’s workshop; he seems to have shifted his attention
from one manuscript to another whenever “feeling and fantasy compel me to write”.