Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, May 21, 1993 TAG: 9305190011
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-3 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: By SETH WILLIAMSON SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES & WORLD-NEWS
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Long
The Virginia Tech musicologist is the organizer of "Liszt and His World," which he describes as "a small, European-style conference" that began Thursday and continues through Sunday at Tech.
Scholars and musicians from Europe and North America will consider the legacy of the great pianist and composer, pausing for a concert of Liszt's music Saturday night in the Squires Recital Salon.
Franz Liszt has never lacked an enthusiastic public from his own day until now, but his critical reputation has endured a roller-coaster ride. It's still fashionable in some quarters to dismiss him as a vulgar showman.
"He played to his audience, there's no question about that," concedes Saffle. "But if he sometimes seems excessive by modern standards - well, we're getting more fond again of really getting our money's worth when we go to a concert.
"What Liszt tried to do in his career was to balance some of the showmanship with some extraordinarily austere music. He was not always to the vulgar extreme, but sometimes to the austere extreme."
Liszt the scandalous and Liszt the proto-rock star will get much attention during this weekend's gathering. Europe was swept by a wave of "Lisztomania" during the 1840s, and the pianist is said to have collected the first set of music groupies.
"The women just threw themselves at him," said Saffle. "They would even wear his dead cigar butts in necklaces. One woman wore one in a reticule and it smelled so bad that people would actually cross the street to avoid her.
"He was the Sting or Mick Jagger of his day, with all the girls at his feet."
Lisztomania will be addressed by James Deaville of Canada's McMaster University, whose paper is titled "Liszt, Michael Jackson, and the German Press."
The composer's scandalous affair with the Countess d'Agoult, which produced three children without benefit of marriage, also will be the subject of several papers. The pair's ultimately bitter relationship has exercised an enduring fascination for classical music fans who love to dish the dirt.
Alan Walker, described by Saffle as "the foremost Lisztian in English," will present a paper critical of d'Agoult as edgy, nervous, a gossip and a backbiter.
The countess went on to write books about Liszt and their relationship, portraying him, in Saffle's words, as "a kind of Mephistophelian artist, a devil in pants, no good as a musician but a great womanizer." The musicologist says the countess's media blitz hurt the composer's reputation in his own day.
But Charles Suttoni, an independent scholar, will deliver a paper defending the countess's reputation.
Saffle, who is a Liszt expert himself, says that there's a lot more to the composer than his rock-star ego and sensational stories. In fact, Saffle says Franz Liszt can stand comparison with a composer who at first glance seems utterly dissimilar: Franz Josef Haydn, the epitome of classical coolness and proportion.
"They're both extraordinarily witty composers; in Liszt's case, it's the cleverness with which the piano writing is worked out. The pieces are hard, but they sound harder than they are, and often only the pianist gets the joke," said Saffle.
"He also likes to experiment, and he doesn't do the same thing twice - you always get a little something new and experimental. It doesn't always come off, but he always tries.
"Both Haydn and Liszt had real Catholic devotion, but there was also a tension between the spirit and the flesh - they both had problems with women, and both had to deal with worldly success," said Saffle.
Saffle points out that, because of his restless experimentation plus his long working life, Liszt deserves to be known as the first impressionistic composer and the first atonal composer as well.
Liszt, however, generally has not received the attention lavished on Haydn or other major composers, a fact which visibly piques Saffle.
One conference participant will deliver a paper on two huge collections of Liszt's music in New York City. The collections are almost unknown, says the musicologist, but "they would have been written about in detail 50 years ago if they'd been composed by Mozart."
Even worse, there are major Liszt compositions that still are almost unknown to the public. "I could name a dozen big pieces that aren't published, choral or orchestral works, some of them published technically in the 19th century but really hard to get hold of now," said Saffle.
A new edition of the composer's music has been in preparation in Hungary for some years, but Saffle says at the rate of "one slim volume per year," it won't be finished until 2075.
Furthermore, at the moment Franz Liszt lacks a champion among big-name conductors, though Bernard Haitink and Georg Solti frequently have performed his work in recent years.
On the plus side, the English pianist Leslie Howard is recording a massive complete edition of Liszt's piano works, which will amount to 60 compact discs when finished.
Saturday night's concert will offer a good chance to hear a number of rarely performed Liszt compositions. Gabor Fuchs, a former Soviet pianist who emigrated to America in 1976, will be joined by violinist David Salness and cellist Tom Shaw of the Audubon Quartet. On the program will be the Grand Duo Concertant, three pieces for cello and piano, plus the crowd-pleasing "Mephisto Waltz."
"Liszt and His World" A concert in the salon with pianist Gabor Fuchs, Joined by David Salness and Tom Shaw of Tech's Audubon Quartet, is at 8 p.m. Saturday, with tickets $5 for general admission and $3 for students and seniors. Tickets are available only at the door.
by CNB