osd@hou2e.UUCP (Orlando Sotomayor-Diaz) (05/11/84)
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"Late Piano Works" (Liszt) by Alfred Brendel, Phillips 9500 775.
This includes: "Aux Cypres de la Villa d'Este" "Valse oubliee"(No. 1)
"Schlummerlied" "Les jeux d'eau a la Villa d'Este" "Csardas macabre" ...
It comes with an essay by Brendel called Liszt's "Bitterness of Heart"
in which Brendel says:
"To me many of Liszt's late pieces anticipate a discovery that took
place in European painting at the turn of the century: that of the
"primitive" or "barbaric," as seen for example in Gauguin's Tahiti,
in masks from Africa or Oceania, or in early Romanesque sculpture.
Goethe, the paragon of a civilised man, spoke in 1805 of an "irresistible
propensity for the absurd, which brings to light again the hereditary
savagery of grimace-loving primitives in the midst of the most
respectable world, all culture to the contrary." The contrasts to the
pictorial arts are obvious: instead of drawing their inspiration, like
the Fauves, from "primitive" tribal art, or, like Picasso, from
Pyrenean wood sculpture, Liszt drew his grimacing visions from within
himself. There were additional contributions from sources as disparate
as the gipsies, the younger Russian composers, and Gregorian chant;
but the most important impulse came from the musical situation of the
time - from the dissolution of tonality and the forms that depended on
it. That Liszt was aware of what he was doing, is evident in the
title of one of his last pieces: in the "Bagatelle without Tonality"
even a passing attachment to a key is avoided. Almost independent of
Wagner's "Tristan" chromaticism, and more consistently than any of his
contemporaries, Liszt heralds the music of the twentieth century."
(Liszt died in 1886.)
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