The quotation marks indicate the title of a recent book by Jonathan Kregor, which is receiving review treatment by Charles Rosen in the current issue of The New York Review of Books. Rosen has one of the keenest analytic minds among today’s scholars of music; so, when I found out that today I would be covering a piano recital of transcriptions by Franz Liszt in the Noontime Concerts™ series at Old St. Mary’s Cathedral, I decided to keep Rosen’s text at arm’s length until I assembled my own thoughts. The pianist was Brendan Kinsella, and he definitely left me with many thoughts. Hopefully, I shall be able to express them in a coherent form.
I should, however, begin with a declaration of the baggage that I did bring to this concert. I have had a long-standing interest in Liszt’s transcriptions ever since my piano teacher in Santa Barbara first exposed me to his treatment of several songs by Franz Schubert. I have heard pianists such as Earl Wild and Jorge Bolet perform many of those transcriptions in concert, and they constitute a healthy share of my collection of recordings. Furthermore, while I have never been able to rise beyond the level of rank amateur at the keyboard, my Santa Barbara teacher encouraged me to explore the transcriptions. I have done this with one symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven (the first) and several Schubert songs, including “Erlkönig,” which was on today’s program.
I shall begin my “examination,” as Kinsella did his recital, with the Schubert selections. “Erlkönig” was the last of his set of three, having been preceded by “Du bist die Ruh” and “Gretchen am Spinnrade.” When you look at the printed scores of these pieces, the first thing you notice is that the texts of the songs appear over the notes. This is not just Liszt’s way of reminding you that, however elaborate his embellishments may be, the vocal line is always present. More important is that the text is there because it signifies: If the pianist does not “get” the poetry that Schubert captured so exquisitely, then he has missed the point of playing the transcription in the first place.
This was the problem with Kinsella’s execution. All of the notes were there, each one in its properly appointed place, all with competent phrasing and dynamic control. Nevertheless, the poetry was missing; and, without that sense of poetry, the pianist would have done better to rattle off some “transcendental” etudes or even the B minor sonata.
Ironically, there are times when Schubert has a strong hand in that poetic quality, perhaps even stronger than the poet’s; and “Erlkönig” makes for an excellent case in point. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote the text as a simple ballad to open his 1782 Singspiel Die Fischerin (the fisherwoman); and, as is the case with many ballads, the text is pretty flat doggerel in the service of a spine-tingling narrative. The ballad is sung by an old woman at a spinning wheel, cranking away in time to its three-beat meter. When she finishes singing, her first spoken words are, “That’s the umpteenth time I’ve sung that damned thing tonight!”
Schubert turned all of this on its head. He abandoned the tedious three-beat dactyls, replacing them with a Presto agitato in common (four-beat) time. He dispensed with a ballad singer and replaced her with a mini-drama with four distinct characters, a narrator, the father, his sick son, and Death. Through the music each of these voices (including the dispassionate narrator) emerges as a fleshed-out character; and Liszt keeps those characters alive through his own choices of register and surrounding context of the accompanying voices. When properly performed, the transcription can be as thrilling as the best performance of the original version.
Unfortunately, Kinsella never quite breathed life into those characters, any more than he caught the erotic frisson that goes through Gretchen’s body when she recalls Faust’s kiss. As a performer, Kinsella knew how to rise to all of Liszt’s virtuosic demands. He just never “got” the poetry; and the whole point of these transcriptions was that Liszt admired Schubert’s interpretation of those poems as much as he admired the composer’s musical talents.
The remainder of the program was devoted to the transcription of Beethoven’s Opus 67 symphony in C minor (best known as “the fifth”). In my own experience with Liszt’s take on the first symphony, I was struck by how he could use transcription as a device for clarifying the foreground-background distinctions among all of the notes in Beethoven’s score. I have not examined the transcription of the fifth, but I am pretty confident that Liszt approached it with the same objective in mind. He probably could count on the music being familiar to most of the audience, which means that he had two options in his approach. One was that he could just dazzle the audience with a flood of notes, and the other was that he could use the transcription to provide them with a new way to listen to Beethoven. I like to believe that Liszt did so much of the former with his pieces that were not transcriptions that the latter option is the more likely.
Here, again, Kinsella fell short of the mark. Yes, we could all listen to his performance in the context of our familiarity with the symphony. We could then all nod our heads in agreement and declare, “Yep, it’s all there!” However, that leaves the question of just what was “all there.” As with the Schubert transcriptions, notes, phrases, and dynamics were all in their proper places; but, if Liszt had anything to say about his own personal approach to listening to this symphony, that message got lost in all of the surface-level attention to proper execution.
I would conclude with a rather strong statement of principle: I see no value in trying to perform a composition by either Beethoven or Schubert without first making a solid existential commitment to just what you want that music to be. Without that commitment, all you have are the marks on the score pages. Sadly Kinsella lacked that commitment; and, for all the points he scored on raw technique, he never really had anything to say about the music itself.
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