Volume 31, Number 6 · April 12, 1984
The New Sound of Liszt
By Charles Rosen
Franz Liszt: Volume 1, The Virtuoso Years, 1811-1847
by Alan Walker
Knopf, 481 pp., $25.00
Berlioz and Liszt are assured of immortality. By now, their right to a place in the pantheon of nineteenth-century composers goes largely unchallenged. Yet this place is equivocal. The worst criticisms made during their lifetimes are still repeated by musicians today: Liszt is cheap and flashy, Berlioz incompetent. The charges are astonishingly heavy and detailed. Liszt's melodies are banal, his harmonies tawdry, his large forms repetitious and uninteresting; Berlioz was incapable of writing correct counterpoint, his harmony is full of grammatical solecisms that a second-year conservatory student would know how to avoid, and his sense of form was defective. One might well think that it is especially heroic to have achieved greatness against such odds.
Review, 5876 words
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