even with the largest and most heterogeneous audience. But in his original music,
however externalized the idiom may often be, however calculated to achieve a maximum
effect in terms of colour and pattern sequence, the display is never cheap or tawdry, for
almost always an imaginative quality, an indefinable poetic essence underlies the passage
work, raising it to a level consistent with the rest of the context.
As a great part of Liszt’s output is programme music, the lore which has become
associated with some of the works is essential for their interpretation. Again, there are
traditional emendations and alterations, for when Liszt played his own compositions to
his pupils he frequently improved on the published versions. Stavenhagen, who often
turned over for Liszt on such occasions, told us that he once plucked up courage to point
out to Liszt that he was not playing a passage as he himself had written it. The work in
question happened to be the Paganini Study in E minor. Liszt looked at the passage
closely, then turning to Stavenhagen with a mischievous smile he asked him whether he
liked the improved version better. Stavenhagen confessed that he did, and Liszt
suggested to him that he should make a note of the alteration and hand it down.
The maximum amount of demarcation between two successive phrases is achieved by
means of a full use of break, dynamic change and ritardando, all combined, as for
instance before the statement or re-statement of a main theme. In such cases the
composer usually indicates how the phrasing is to be effected, but in the following
instance, in addition to making a ritardando, as marked, and starting the new [Grandioso]
theme fortissimo, it would be justifiable to make a clear break before the double bar so as
to allow a distinct articulation of the first note of the theme:- [here follows a musical
illustration from Liszt’s Sonata in B minor consisting of bars 103-106].
According to Stavenhagen an excellent illustration of rubato was once given by Liszt to a
pupil who had been unsuccessfully trying to play his Nocturne in A flat. Liszt was living
in the Hofgärtnerei in Weimar at the time, and the window of the music room looked out
on a park. It was a stormy day. ‘Observe that tree,’ he said, ‘sometimes the wind sways
it gently, sometimes violently to and fro, sometimes the whole tree is bent in motion,
again it is quite still. Or look at that cornfield in the distance, over which the wind
sweeps with an undulating rhythm. That is perfect rubato, the tempered movement of the
corn, the reluctant yielding of the tree, but when you play rubato, your corn, your tree is
smitten to the ground!
Stavenhagen, quoting Liszt, used to say that three hours a day would be sufficient for any
pianist who practised regularly, not spasmodically once or twice a week. Chopin used to
go so far as to forbid his pupils to practise more than three hours. This was Liszt’s
practice period even when he was over sixty years of age, and had played with triumph in
every capital in Europe. Moreover, he was one of these naturally gifted geniuses, who
had only to glance at a score to be able to play it.
Liszt, in his essay on John Field, relates how Field was accustomed to practise technical
exercises for a few hours daily, even in his old age, with a large coin on the back of his