attentive one can learn enormously from him in technical matters. One must be swift to
seize on the Master’s technical secrets.
Kellermann’s mastery of pedalling, for instance, on which subject he wrote a
comprehensive treatise, was largely derived from the practice of the master. Both
Kellermann and Stavenhagen were in an altogether different category from the ‘one-day’
pupils who cashed in so lamentably in later years on Liszt’s name, for both lived for
years on intimate terms with him and had detailed information as to how he practised and
worked. The methods of a pianist who was probably the greatest virtuoso of all time
could not be without significance, even after the lapse of so many years.
Because, unfortunately, neither Stavenhagen nor Kellermann seem to have left any
detailed written records of Liszt’s teaching, it is my purpose to preserve through these
pages at least some of the chief points which were impressed on me by one or other of
them in the course of studying Chopin’s and Liszt’s compositions.
Liszt may be regarded as the founder of modern piano playing. He extended the range of
the instrument’s possibilities by inventing new methods of laying out scale passages,
arpeggios, broken chords, octave passages and trills, by extending the range of colour
procurable by the sustaining pedal, and by using to the full both the extreme depths as
well as the extreme heights of the instrument, thereby giving it an orchestral sonority – in
fact his inventiveness has since hardly been excelled. Less original, less intensely
personal than Schumann or Chopin, his music is more brilliantly effective than theirs; yet
it has never attained the popularity which might have been expected, since, among other
reasons, it is not easily playable by amateurs, while a fair proportion of the music of the
other romantic composers makes comparatively small demands on the pianist’s technique.
There are relatively few works of Liszt (the Consolations and some of the Harmonies
Poétiques et Réligieuses are among the exceptions) which do not involve difficult
passage work of one kind or another, so that only pianists of professional standard are
really competent to attempt his music.
More important still, re-creative ability is needed for its interpretation, since the style is
often impressionistic and the structure sketchy, so that the player must be able to piece
the various sections together, moulding their outlines so as to give an impression of unity
and cohesion. This is probably what Liszt means when he remarked once to Kellermann
that few people could either play or understand his music. Instead of striving to make a
continuous line of thought emerge from amidst the oratorical style of argument, pianists
usually tend to dwell on the asides and interpolations, making the most out of the
technical display which those afford. As a result not only is the structure of the whole
work impaired, but the coloratura, which is meant to serve as an impressionistic
commentary on the main trend of the music, loses its poetic quality, and is turned into a
jungle of meaningless sound or an empty display of jugglery. The once fashionable
criticism that Liszt’s music is a thing of ‘trills, scales and cadenzas’ (as a Dublin critic
once wrote in connection with a Liszt recital I gave at the Abbey Theatre) may
sometimes apply to the transcriptions and pot-pourris, though even here Liszt served a
useful purpose in imparting to the piano such powers of delivery as commanded attention