Liszt Rhapsodies
An excerpt from "Liszt Rhapsodies" by Donn Teal
Ovation (August 1986)
I love a great many of the transcriptions. A transcription like the ‘Spinning Song’ from The Flying Dutchman is, I think, an absolute masterpiece of piano writing and of transcribing the character and spirit of Wagner.
It always amazes me when people and critics comment with some surprise on the poetry and the lyricism that they claim to notice in my performances of music by Liszt. I can’t understand why it should be a surprise to anyone, because Liszt was a very intensely religious man. Therefore, so much of his music is lyrical, poetic, and it has a religious quality. Unfortunately, many performances of Liszt in the last thirty-five or forty years have emphasised the pyrotechnics and the virtuoso elements—the
mechanical display of very fast octave passages and all those things which, yes, are in Liszt’s music. I don’t believe in emphasising these elements at the expense of other elements that are so much more musical.
Through long years of study and experience, I have found that Liszt in performance requires a totally unique style. You cannot play him the way you play Schumann or the way you play Chopin. For Liszt’s music you must, naturally, study the score very carefully, you must master the mechanics of simply playing the notes. And then—well, then you are in a position to be able to play the music very freely. By ‘very freely’ I mean not hesitating in the slightest to change dynamics, tempi, or whatever.
We know that Liszt was very free with everybody else’s music in performance. If that was his attitude toward what others had written, he certainly must have been doubly free with works of his own. I like to feel that whenever I am playing Liszt, I am playing something that I wrote myself. I am completely free, I don’t hesitate in the slightest to alter things, because I know that it’s very much in the nature of the music.’
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