Kenneth Hamilton (Editor) - The Cambridge Companion to Liszt

This Companion provides an up-to-date view of the music of Franz Liszt, its contemporary context and performance practice, written by some of the leading specialists in the field of nineteenth-century music studies. Although a core of Liszts piano music has always maintained a firm hold on the repertoire, his output was so vast, influential and multi-faceted that scholarship too has taken some time to assimilate his achievement. This book offers students and music lovers some of the latest views in an accessible form. Katharine Ellis, Alexander Rehding and James Deaville present the biographical and intellectual aspects of Liszts legacy; Kenneth Hamilton, James Baker and Anna Celenza give a detailed account of Liszts piano music, including approaches to performance; Monika Hennemann discusses Liszts Lieder; and Reeves Shulstad and Dolores Pesce survey his orchestral and choral music.

Kenneth Hamilton is pianist-in-residence and senior lecturer in music at the University of Birmingham, UK. A virtuoso pianist with an international reputation, he is also an authority on Liszt and has a special interest in nineteenth-century performing techniques. He is the author of the Cambridge Music handbook Liszt: Sonata in B Minor .

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The Cambridge Companion to Liszt presents a survey and contextualisation of his music by some of the leading writers in the field. Few composers have benefited more than Liszt from the upsurge in interest in Romanticism over the last few decades, and the centenary of his death in 1986 gave extra impetus to re-evaluation of his importance. A volume such as this is very different from one that could have been written even twenty years ago. In the first place, a greater quantity of Liszts music is now in print. The New Liszt Edition (Editio Musica, Budapest) is gradually progressing through what must be one of the most dauntingly large work-lists of any composer, and many formerly overlooked or unpublished pieces are now easily available for study. In the second place, and at least as importantly, much more of Liszts music is actually being played and heard. If a central core of his achievement mostly some piano pieces and a handful of symphonic poems has always been in the standard repertoire, the rest has until recently remained on the periphery. Although it is still true that several masterpieces the Gran Mass and Psalm XIII come immediately to mind deserve much more frequent performance, artists are now including pieces on concert programmes or recordings that have hardly been heard since their creation. One pioneering project that must be mentioned specifically in this context is Leslie Howards astonishing achievement in committing all of Liszts piano music to disc (on the Hyperion label), including all significantly different versions and all available extant unpublished works. Owing to the success of this monumental undertaking, even the most obscure transcriptions or historically important `first attempts', like the early versions of the Dante Sonata, need no longer be only references on a page, but can be experienced directly by any interested music-lover, however shaky or non-existent their piano technique. Gradually more of Liszts output in other genres is also being recorded, and this will no doubt prompt further re-evaluation of his legacy. After all, even Wagner declared that he found it virtually impossible to judge Liszts symphonic poems from the printed page he needed to hear them played.