The plain fact that works called ‘concerto’ continued to be composed after 1945 demonstrates the failure of twentieth-century avant-garde initiatives to create a totally new musical world whose qualities and characteristics could persuade the entire community of classical composers to adopt them. Historians of culture tend to acknowledge that the very notion of an avant-garde is only meaningful in a comparative context, requiring the survival of those allegedly exhausted, conservative values and procedures that radical progressives seek to supplant: and no credible cultural history of the years since 1900 can ignore the extraordinary diversity of stylistic and structural initiatives in composition – old, new, progressive, regressive – the most profound legacy of the Romantic and modernist individualism that formed the foundations of twentieth-century culture in the widest sense.

There would nevertheless have been little point in composers after 1945 producing concertos, or any other works in such well-established genres as symphony, opera or string quartet, if institutions suited to the regular presentation of such works had not survived, and continued to prosper. In the case of the concerto the insatiable desire among concert audiences and record buyers for brilliant soloistic display must always be matched by the enthusiasm of individual virtuosos for new challenges, and while very few if any professional solo performers since 1945 have been able to make a career exclusively from the promotion of the new and the unfamiliar, the continued prominence of the concerto owes much to the supreme gifts of artists like Mstislav Rostropovich and Heinz Holliger whose advocacy of the new gained credibility by way of their evident and equal mastery of the old.

Nearly all of the compositions that Franz Liszt wrote later in life were smaller pieces, as opposed to the Faust Symphony, Piano Sonata, and oratorios that crowned his middle period. One might gather that by his later years Liszt had lost the mental acuity and creative energy to complete big projects. He certainly had suffered a crisis of confidence as he approached old age. Yet three collections of keyboard pieces written in his later years exhibit such substance and scope that they fully warrant consideration as major works on a par with his earlier acknowledged masterworks. These collections, Via Crucis, Historische Ungarische Bildnisse, and Années de pèlerinage, troisième année, all exhibit complex cyclic concepts carrying forward Liszt's work in three important categories: sacred, nationalistic, and programmatic music.

Via Crucis

The Via Crucis is unique among Liszt's larger late keyboard works. The question arises whether it ought to be considered a keyboard work at all. In many cases throughout his career it seems as if Liszt's compositional concepts were not wedded to a particular medium. He was in the habit of composing versions of a composition simultaneously for various media; in certain cases, no single version necessarily claims priority over the others – and the Via Crucis may be one of these cases. Liszt, being the pre-eminent producer of keyboard arrangements of large orchestral works, could have written the keyboard version of Via Crucis simply for the purpose of disseminating the music for individual study and appreciation (as was the case with his transcriptions of much of the symphonic repertoire of the time); such arrangements were a major source of income.

During his tenure at the court of Weimar, Franz Liszt focused much of his creative energy towards composing orchestral music, primarily his symphonic poems and symphonies. Liszt received the title of Court Kapellmeister Extraordinary on 2 November 1842 and eventually moved to Weimar in 1848 with Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein. As Detlef Altenburg outlines in his article ‘Franz Liszt and the Legacy of the Classical Era’, Liszt and Grand Duke Carl Alexander viewed Liszt's appointment as in artistic succession to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1775–1832) rather than the previous most celebrated Kapellmeister, Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1819–37). In this spirit, Liszt organised several festivals celebrating German artists in Weimar, beginning with the Goethe Festival in August 1849. Many of Liszt's symphonic poems, symphonies and other orchestral works are products of his aim to revive the ‘Weimar spirit’. Even the works that are not directly connected to a Weimar figure are still part of his desire to reignite the creativity associated with the Goethezeit. In addition, Liszt considered his orchestral compositions to be a continuation of Beethoven's achievement. According to a view strongly held by Liszt and Wagner, the symphony – with the exception of Berlioz – had become stagnant after Beethoven. Liszt saw it as his mission to take orchestral composition further along the path initiated by the great symphonist.

Liszt's Lieder have long been, in their original format, among the most neglected areas of his achievement, yet many attracted critical admiration from their first appearance, and several of the piano transcriptions derived from them are among his best-known pieces. After an overview of Liszt's more than eighty songs (over 120 if revisions are included), this chapter will briefly address this paradox, the most extreme example of which is the setting for voice and piano of Freiligrath's ‘O lieb, so lang du lieben kannst’, which is relatively unknown in the original, although the composer's own solo arrangement, incarnated for piano as the third of Liebesträume – Drei Notturnos – is almost tiresomely popular. This general trend in the reception of Liszt's songs and song transcriptions established itself during his lifetime and continued throughout the twentieth century. When Michael Saffle first came to compile his Garland Guide to Liszt Research in 1991, it was selfevident to him that ‘no comparable portion of Liszt's output has received less attention from scholars than his songs and recitations for solo voice’. This echoed at a distance of more than a hundred years Francis Hueffer's entry on Liszt for the first edition of Sir George Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, which appeared before the composer's death. Writing at a point when the Liebesträume piano transcriptions and to a slightly lesser extent those of the three Petrarch Sonnets were already well-known works, Hueffer deplored the fact that the songs had been ‘not hitherto sufficiently appreciated by Liszt's critics’.

This dialogue between Liszt and a pupil with surprisingly modern attitudes from an 1877 masterclass in Rome presents in a nutshell one fundamental problem in the interpretation of his piano music, namely, how essential, or even advisable, is strict adherence to the letter of the score. An associated problem concerns the spirit of the score: how did Liszt expect his music to sound, and what interpretative approach should we adopt if we wish to respect this? We could well argue – and this would ironically be a typical nineteenth-century view – that Liszt performance in the twenty-first century ought to be moulded by modern concert conditions, instruments and expectations, and not those of a bygone era. But even if this attitude is adopted, it is surely better adopted on the basis of knowledge of what we are rejecting, rather than as a merely plausible substitute for ignorance. The following pages address issues in Liszt performance by briefly discussing Liszt's aesthetic outlook, the pianos he used, his playing style and the legacy of his teaching. There exists a large body of material – some written, some recorded – that not only amplifies, but sometimes contradicts, instructions in Liszt's scores. In fact, even to talk about ‘the score’ in the case of many Liszt pieces is problematical, as many exist in a multiplicity of versions with differences ranging from minor nuances to major reworkings.

Liszt's piano works have always rightly been regarded as his greatest musical monument. Even those who find his general style inimical have acknowledged that his technical imagination as a writer of piano music and his command of keyboard colour were unsurpassed. Brahms, otherwise an inveterate hater of Liszt's music, found in his operatic fantasies the ‘classicism of keyboard technique’, but the mastery of his original music, often denigrated by his contemporaries, is now routinely acknowledged. To be sure, Liszt could be justly charged with his own criticism of Schubert: ‘he was too immoderately productive, wrote incessantly, mingling what was trivial with what was important, what was great with what was mediocre, paying no heed to criticism and allowing his wings free flight’. The composer who in 1856 completed his remarkable Dante Symphony, but the same year served up the pompously banal Festvorspiel, was perhaps more than usually subject to the vagaries of inspiration, but a century after his death Liszt's core masterpieces remained firmly fixed in the standard concert repertoire, and many other lesser-known works would reward more regular exposure today.

It is a well-known fact that Liszt took minor orders in 1865, caricatured as the 50-some-year-old composer conducting with flailing arms in a black cassock. The promulgated viewpoint depicts him changing from the worldly piano virtuoso, to Wagner-championing conductor, to seemingly humble abbé, yet still seeking public approbation. His spirituality is called into question. What this chapter attempts to elucidate is the sincerity and coherence of Liszt's religious views as seen through his sacred choral music which he began composing as early as 1842 and continued composing until a year before his death in 1886. It divides his sacred choral works into two periods: 1842–59, that is, through his early years and Weimar appointment; and 1860–86, from when he was preparing to leave Weimar for Rome until his death. This chronological overview discusses a given work in relationship to its date of conception, allowing that its composition and revision may have gone on for years and even decades.

Before turning to Liszt's works of the 1840s and 50s, we examine Liszt's previous attitudes towards the Church and its music, which were determined in large part by his exposure to the ideas of the Abbé Robert Félicité de Lamennais. Lamennais figured prominently in the already precarious political and religious climate of the 1830s when he urged his followers to reject the divine right of kings and replace it with the sovereignty of the people. According to Lamennais, the Church, led by the Papacy, should lead its people into a new world order that would address oppression of the poor and bring about equality and liberty.

In 1898 Ferruccio Busoni presented a series of four concerts at the Sing-Akademie in Berlin on the history of the concerto. In the programme notes printed as an accompaniment to Busoni's performances, another pianist, José Vianna da Motta, explained that the goal of the concerts was to renew respect for the concerto and to show that, at least in its modern form as represented by the works of Liszt, the concerto was no longer a genre designed simply for virtuosic display. At the first concert, Vianna da Motta began his essay with the following observation:

In what has become a famous letter to Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, dated 13 August 1856, Liszt described himself as ‘one half gypsy, the other Franciscan’. In a sense, he was being modest. One can easily expand the hallmarks of his scintillating public persona into an array of conflicting images: the flashy virtuoso versus the profound symphonic composer, the irresistible sex god versus the ascetic Catholic priest, the Hungarian nationalist versus the European cosmopolitan. All the facets in this kaleidoscope of images seem to sit side by side in peaceful coexistence, in spite and because of their apparently contradictory nature.

In this situation it goes without saying that modern Liszt biographers have habitually bemoaned the sheer impossibility of the task of painting an authentic picture of the charismatic musician: his character simply seems to be too complex, too evasive to be captured by biographical methods. Thus Alan Walker, Liszt's most authoritative modern biographer, opens his three-volume work with a sigh:

It is one of the ironies of French history that the revolution which brought with it the bourgeois king, Louis-Philippe, and a ‘middle-of-the-road’ official attitude to both culture and government policy should also have marked the beginning of the headiest decade of French Romanticism: the 1830s. Extremism and compromise coexisted in the form of several philosophies – artistic, religious and social – competing for attention. Added to which, the nature of Romanticism itself as a self-conscious movement defined as much by internal contradiction as anything else meant that living in Paris during the 1830s offered unparalleled intellectual and artistic stimulation. For a young man of Liszt's intellectual curiosity such bounties were not to be scorned. The city was effectively his university.

Salon culture was buoyant, populated by the major figures of French Romanticism: Delacroix, Sand, Vigny, Hugo, Musset, Lamartine, Berlioz, Chopin, Heine and Balzac. To this constellation of friends and acquaintances, Liszt could add his connections with Maurice Schlesinger's Revue et Gazette musicale (a mouthpiece for German Romantic ideas in France), his enthusiasm for the Saint-Simonians and for the Liberal Catholic philosophies of the Abbé Robert Félicité Lamennais and the writer and social philosopher Pierre-Simon Ballanche. Voracious reading extended from the Bible and the writings of St Augustine and Thomas à Kempis to Goethe, Byron, Montaigne, Voltaire, Hugo, Chateaubriand and the work of historians such as Michelet and Quinet.

Introduction: the problem of Liszt

At the turn of the nineteenth century, less than two decades after his death, Franz Liszt's claims to immortality seemed built on rather shaky ground. True, his name remained associated with the greatest career of pianistic virtuosity of all times, yet that type of notoriety was in many ways antithetical to a place within the pantheon of music history. Of his musical works beyond those for the piano, only the two concertos, Les Préludes and the Faust Symphony were being performed at the time in Europe and North America with any regularity, and it was primarily popular piano works like the Liebesträume and the Hungarian Rhapsodies that appeared in anthologies of piano music.

This marginal position for Liszt is all the more surprising since during his lifetime, above all before his departure from the concert stage in 1847, he was one of the best-known musical personalities in Europe, indeed, a leading figure within the culture of the times. Publication figures provide concrete evidence for his tremendous popularity during the 1840s (see below, ‘Publishing’), as do reports in the newspapers about the raging ‘Lisztomania’ in his concert cities. In later years, Liszt's lingering notoriety as performer ensured that his activities would attract interest in the musical and daily press.

When he took up his new quarters in the Villa d'Este in 1869, Franz Liszt was 58 years old, and he seemed to recognise that a new phase of his life was beginning. The Villa afforded the seclusion he needed to escape the demands of a hectic schedule and to turn his attention to what he most wanted to do – write music. Nonetheless, he was not able or willing to renounce the obligations he felt toward his public, his Hungarian homeland, his Roman Catholic faith, and especially the significant group of young musicians who sought his guidance. He had hit upon the arrangement of a ‘vie trifurquée’ that he was to maintain for the remainder of his years, dividing his time between Rome, Weimar, and Budapest.

It is well known that one of the most popular works of literary utopianism, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), was written during the era of American literary Realism; few are familiar with the extraordinary outpouring of utopian novels that appeared between Looking Backward and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915). From the late 1880s to the turn of the century alone, over 150 utopian novels were published in the United States, a figure unequalled in any other country or historical period. It may seem paradoxical, from the perspective of literary history, to find a vogue of utopian art and thought in a culture renowned for its practicality and materialism. But it is precisely the intensity and pace of capitalist development that helps to explain the appeal of utopianism. The utopian novelistic form afforded writers a distance, which facilitated their profound engagement with the economic and social developments that both dazzled and disturbed them. In work after work, narrators and characters experienced the detached contemplation of the utopian perspective. They tested the institutionalization of extreme principles, sometimes radically enlightened ones, as in William Dean Howells's The Traveler From Altruria (1894), sometimes dangerously pessimistic ones, as in Ignatius Donnelly's Caesar's Column (1890). They imagined inventions and scientific advances beyond the ken of contemporaries, as in Alvarado Fuller's A.D. 2000 (1890) and Arthur Bird's Looking Forward (1899). Or, as in Unveiling a Parallel (1893) by Alice Jones and Ella Merchant, they conceived of societies where probable but still remote political changes – women's right to vote and occupational parity with men – had been realized.

In 1861, the year the Civil War began, Harriet Jacobs published Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Jacobs was born a slave in 1813 in Edenton, North Carolina; her father was a skilled carpenter, and her mother the slave of a tavern keeper. Jacobs lived with both parents until the age of six, and was taught to read, but in 1824, the family of Dr. James Norcom inherited her, and she was increasingly subjected to Norcom's sexual predation. Seeking protection, Jacobs took her own lover, a white lawyer, and had two children with him. In 1835, Jacobs ran away and was sheltered by white as well as black neighbors before she entered the tiny attic crawlspace in the home of her grandmother, who was free. Jacobs remained in hiding for seven years. Sewing, reading, and writing to pass the time, she was bothered most by immobility and exposure to the elements through the thin roof. Her health permanently compromised, Jacobs escaped to the North in 1842, and after a brief reunion with her children found work as a nursemaid for a New York magazine editor. As a fugitive (under the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, which mandated the return of all escaped slaves), Jacobs was haunted by the prospect of recapture by Norcom, who pursued her. Forced to flee New York and then Boston, Jacobs followed her brother John S. Jacobs, an abolitionist, to Rochester, New York, where she had access to an abolitionist library, and worked daily in the antislavery reading room just above the newspaper offices of Frederick Douglass.