Humphrey Searle (1915–1982)

Well, the best and the most obvious feature of this book is the catalog of Liszt's works, which is quite influential, and, with the addition of a few minor discoveries, forms the basis of the way his music is still organized or cataloged today; Liszt pieces are assigned 'S' numbers for Searle, the guy who wrote this book. And the later additions are very small; all of the pieces that Liszt is known for and then some--including much obscure work--is in the catalog in the back of the 1966 Searle book. However, given the fact that the book is therefore somewhat famous in its field, it can be rather disappointing to actually sit down and read, in large part because of the prose, which is as dry as an old bone. And, especially since the catalog you can find online is technically (ever so) slightly more complete than what's in the old print version, the mere clerical virtuosity of the book alone is not enough to make it truly great, or even worth holding onto after you're finished reading, honestly.

"The Music of Liszt" is indeed much closer to a catalog whose main text is really just an elaborate series of notes, than a truly worthwhile descriptive piece with a catalog provided as a an appendix. And the title is meant to be taken quite literally--it is not a biographical book, and the only actual sketch of Liszt's life is in the form of a timeline which is put in the back next to the catalog of his music. In one sense perhaps this is not so bad, since from my limited knowledge of his life, I think there are probably a couple of episodes which could be used to make fun of him, despite their total lack of malice on the sort of grandiose Wagnerian scale that you sometimes come across.... The most you could accuse Liszt of is a sort of stupid amiability that allows itself to be superficially influenced by such flourishes of, virtuosity?, not imagining the malice, or at least the great pride, which it could be made to serve. But this is only the work of a popularizer, almost of a vendor, and not as great or terrible as a fighter or a true ideologue.... (And indeed many men have provided adaptations, arrangements, transcriptions, whatever you like, to the public, without having books written about them.) I tarry on this point, but Liszt does I think lack most of the truly timeless quality of the highly-original, and often did work as an adapter of old Catholic or folk themes, or then-new Nineteenth-Century works, which can have the effect of locking him into the conventions of a particular era, rather than simply having a certain perspective from a certain circumstance, into what the nature of things really is.... Even his great innovation, the symphonic poem, is at least not *meant* to be fully independent of words and the vanity they can have, but are based on things like something Lord Byron wrote about some now-obscure medieval poet most famous for his (positive) treatment of the Crusades, some sort of funeral dirge for a revolution in 1830, a Shakespearean drama, and a battle that the heathen Huns fought with the armies of Christ in the olden times.... This is not meant to say that program music--with meaning, and not entirely abstract-- cannot be done well, but I would in this case defer to the judgment of the public and say that the very popular 'Four Seasons' of Vivaldi is probably the best example, and that work lacks any conceit of any kind, or even some of Tchaikovsky's stuff, like Symphony No. 4, which is reasonably well-liked, and very well done, having a sort of philosophy, but not chained to any event in time.... Liszt's symphonic poems by contrast draw on stilted references--perhaps with the exception of, say, "Festklänge/Festival Sounds", however I cannot even imagine anyone playing it at a wedding as it was written to be, and indeed no-one does--and I think much of Liszt's work generally was written for the sake of showmanship.... a sort of shallowness that Searle in his extreme dryness does not comment on, since the human aspects of this subject seem to be almost beyond his curiosity, which seems to restrict itself almost entirely to facts and details. [And, indeed, in the absence of real biographical information--the human side of music-- the chronological organization he employs is far from helpful, since all it does is separate different drafts of pieces that are essentially the same work; if he intended it to only be about the music in a strict sense, then he probably should have organized the book by type of composition, so he could analyze the nature of Liszt's take on symphonic work and solo piano works, and adaptions of various kinds versus original work, etc. Given the nature of Searle's mind, he should actually have *literally* taken the catalog as an outline, as opposed to pretending as though he were going to describe "the virtuoso years" when he certainly does no such thing. Compositions between 1839-47, perhaps, but not life on tour.... so the historical pretension--although I suppose this very pretension may be what made him decline to describe the wild crowds--is not at all justified....]

And this exclusion of the personality is unsurprisingly wed with pedantry, which is perhaps most obviously on display when Searle allows foreign-language quotations and titles to pass into the text without translations, hurrying on without explanations, assuming that all is already understood with an almost haughty air which is both the mark of a dilettante and a writer above concern for the reader. Perhaps somewhat more understandably, he also provides excerpts of sheet music, but not always of the finest legibility, and anyway in many cases far above the capabilities of a non-advanced pianist. Perhaps this is not so surprising, since Liszt was such a virtuoso that perhaps the limitations of mere mortal piano players did not always work their way into his deliberations. Although unlike him, Mozart was a gifted performer from a young age, who did not write music for the purpose of being difficult, still less with the goal of being melodramatic and creepy.... Perhaps what is, on the other hand, difficult to work out, is the relationship between Liszt the performer of of pure--although unrecorded-- gifts, and the almost hybrid composer/adapter whose works we can perform ourselves if they are worth our time. (His catalog is divided into two parts, the second and larger part being transcriptions and paraphrases, etc. and the first being his own works, although some of these are also arrangements or variations of what other composers wrote, or adaptions of existing ecclesiastical or national melodies--e.g. "God Save The Queen"--and not fully original: I would guess possibly less than a third are fully his own, or less, although it depends on how you count, but it still does have alot to say about his 'prolific' output, especially when you consider that pieces that are essentially only early drafts, later edits or even unfinished works are assigned their own catalog numbers in additional to the completed works. The padding is what is really prolific.) Certainly it is odd that Searle the Cataloger, the meticulous recorder of clerical details--I know he's written music himself, but even for modern classical music it seems very obscure, and really he seems like an unadulterated t-crosser and i-dotter-- could become so engrossed in the work of the guy whose name lent itself to the term "Lisztomania", i.e., the sort of music-inspired fertility-frenzy that we in more modern times have experienced in the form of Beatlemania and in the following of other more recent pop groups whose names I could not mention for fear of being stoned to death by the classical music community....

Certainly one begins to wonder at a certain point what pieces Franz Liszt actually played to generate the mania that bore his name, and indeed, how many of his own compositions could have fulfilled this task.... or even more modest goals. Perhaps the most annoying part of Searle's book is that he makes himself more of a Liszt enthusiast than a real critic, and at times he comes off sounding like he thinks the entire international classical music community should be reorganized as a sort of Franz Liszt Society; why isn't this or that piece of Liszt's, that he composed when he was still twenty-two, or when he had some free time when he was bored on vacation, and tossed something off--why isn't that performed more often, played at concerts more often, recorded and sold more often? Why doesn't everyone just go nuts over this particular obscure bit from some random list off the catalog? Well, because they don't like it, because it isn't that good, because there are countless countless works in the world of that level of achievement.... {It's wrong to be the partisan of the composer, at least to the extent of trying to deny the public the power to bestow or withhold favor based on merit and worth; to deny this is to put the writer on an aristocratic pedestal and to demand the fawning lies of courtiers and almost salesman's flattery-- "easily the most influential figure in 19th century music" a CD's liner notes says of Liszt, with really quite shameless chutzpah.... And in all honestly, we cannot pretend as though we could guarantee equal playing time for anything ever put to paper--as though this were a Little League game or some sort of strange hybrid liberal-reactionary institution with mandatory quotas for the deceased-- and permit any development at all....} It takes a real enthusiast to perform the entire catalog of a middle-level composer, including all the obscure bits, and even just listening to it all online can become a chore after awhile.... because Liszt certainly has his great moments-- of which the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 is probably the most obvious and best--(there are a few others, but I hesitate to mention 'Liebestraum No. 3' because of that 1800s German-esque artistic morbid-sentimentality which can be a little disturbing....) but overall I think he is a middle-level composer, and not one of the truly great ones like Mozart or Tchaikovsky....

.... Which leads me to perhaps my most difficult point to make. There are different levels of acclaim and fame, and even of acceptance, in the world of classical composers, from the quasi-sacral authority of a Beethoven, all the way down to the guys that literally no one has heard of in God knows how long.... {And it's very annoying to me when *every* composer is reported as increasing in relative popularity, *everyone* is being 're-discovered', and *nobody* has lost a step or fallen back a few ranks in the race. What would you say if *every* ATP player were reported as having increased his rank? (Because even in age of mass appeal--not the catastrophe it's sometimes made out to be--only so many sardines fit in a can, and anyway some ideas, or moods, are opposed....) How seriously do you take announcements of rejuvenation in this context?} But one of the common conceits is that even the most mediocre, average and even talentless fake in the world of classical music is better than anyone at all in the world of popular music, no matter how good they really are. I hate to pick on somebody for a metaphysical beating, but once you start scraping the bottom of the barrel, the utensil you're scraping with starts to make some ugly sounds. Take, for example, Carl Czerny-- a fine piano teacher, by all accounts, and one with some skill for creating exercises of his own devising. Now, I especially hate to pick on a non-German (i.e. a Czech) in an art-world that is sometimes considered essentially Teutonic (get all weird and bombastic now, say it: Bay-toe-van! Bay-toe-van! Bay.... toe.... van!-- Cut off the hair from his corpse and stick it in a jar; it's got special powers!) but spilling ink over the page in the form of a million thirty-second notes or whatever in presto-speed, and calling it 'The Art of Velocity' or whatever.... Maybe in a very technical sense he helped somebody like Liszt to become a freakishly good pianist, but Robert Schumann, a good composer of solo piano music that you *don't* have to be freakishly good to play--can you imagine Liszt, or for that matter Chopin (although Chopin at least can be worth the pain) writing Schumann's "Album for the Young", or for that matter Tchaikovsky's "Children's Album"?-- was right in saying that Czerny's work represents a failure of imagination. Different forms of non-classical or "popular" according to some conception of that word, music can be very well done, and especially in the form of folk music, can be enormously influential on the world of classical music. There wouldn't be a uniquely Russian influence without Russian folk music; there wouldn't be Johann Strauss without the peasant waltz; there wouldn't be dance suites without peasant dances, or variations on national themes without popular ethnic traditions, fairy-tale ballets without folklore, or subtly different national currents or schools of thought in European classical music without subtly different European peoples. (Although there were exchanges of influence too, and ambiguity--Liszt is considered Hungarian and was born in that country, but his ancestors were German and once spelled the name 'List', which is even more Germanic and less 'exotic'-Hungarian.) Anyway, I had a copy of one or two Czerny pieces that somebody threw away once, and I threw them away in my turn. Trash. I even tried to listen to him online once, but that didn't last long.... If you turn on one of the (two) twenty-four hour Music Choice classical music TV channels, of course you'll eventually get, well, classical music, filler. Guys who aren't as good or at least weren't as unique, who had maybe one or two popular pieces, the 'one-hit wonders', who aren't going to get their entire catalog of works released on CD by several different artists every couple of years--or even by anybody, ever, even one time. Maybe the most prominent composer--one whose name I can at least remember--to be void of any real value would be Paganini. His goal in composition was simply to make the piece difficult. He was all image. Now, Liszt is a step or two above a void virtuoso like that, or one of the plain nobodies, but not so much for the transcriptions--anonymous guys can make transcriptions, and they do all the time. I like the adaptions of famous pieces edited by Hans-Gunter Heumann, but nobody's heard of him; he's just an editor. But, Liszt, for his occasional moments of brilliance, like some of the Hungarian Rhapsodies, and especially no. 2, and moments like that, that makes him like a handful-of-wonders guy, than a strict one-hit man like Pachelbel (although God knows Canon in D is better than "Festklänge/Festival Sounds") or developing the idea of the symphonic poem, even if his own aren't necessarily that great, but at least it gave other composers another option, and.... And, other things, too? He's certainly not a Mozart though, or one of the hip French guys, like Gabriel Fauré....

So Searle makes a pretty fundamental mistake of analysis: that because it's Classical Music, and because he wrote about about it, and because technically there's a large Liszt catalog [especially if you include all the drafts and different versions, and near-duplications] that would take an enthusiast a long time to plough through--like that guy Leslie Howard did, a real pedant of a pianist, who thinks that popular music is the sacred foe.... why not just record the complete Carl Czerny catalog? That's at least twice as obscure and it'll take at least as long, and, it's even more distant from popular music, since instead of using folk models it effectively bases itself off 'The Pianists' from 'The Carnival of the Animals'!.... But just because it's classical or non-popular music, whatever that even is, exactly, since it can obviously vary like anything else, doesn't mean that it's.... I don't know, perfect? Inherently worthy? No, it can be trash. Mess it up, and it'll be trash. In fact, a considerable chunk of what gets called classical music is really just the most dreadful church music.... the product of such delirious thinking and bald-faced rejection of beauty, no wonder they sound strange and ugly! So really, classical music can be either good or bad, and it is broadly comparable to other music. Awhile ago I read a book about Brian Wilson (and the recording of "Pet Sounds" was probably 1966's greater contribution to the world of music, than the publication of "The Music of Liszt") and of course over the course of several decades he and his band made plenty of obscure stuff, even though they're one of the most well-known bands America's ever produced. But that's what music lit is going to be about, it's going to be about the obscure stuff; you could go over all the famous stuff in a pamphlet. And as for Wilson, some of the obscure stuff, like "Friends" from 1968, was good. In contrast, listening to about two and a half hours of Liszt's complete symphonic poems was.... well, they were melodramatic, honestly. Not so much Mozart's sunshine, not really meant as entertainment as much as the work of the generation before--this was.... profound nonsense.... and then there's the juvenilia-- Variation on a theme by.... By who? Variations on a theme by, Humpernickel? Oh, yes, classical music can fail. Try going through the entire catalog of a middle-level or below composer--if that's even possible--and you'll find a few that sound like.... like, everything else, I guess. With all the personality of wall-paper. [And indeed Liszt's personality only emerges as a type, at best, that of the ill-named "Romantics", and not with much individuality. And although true creativity is hard to define or pin down, it probably has something to do with intensely unique personality--e.g. 'Mozart is sunshine'--which shines through the forms and formulas, and does not simply cart them along like luggage. It is not the same level of art to simply play around a little bit with what is already there, as though you had remembered the theme but needed to improvise the details. To simply understand the mathematics well enough to write the same thing differently, is not the same as making out of mathematics a new personality.] But maybe catalogers like that, who knows. Catalogers and bureaucrats, and the rest of the fuel for the fire of French satirists.... And yet, somehow, I have to keep checking, just to make sure. Don't be like me. Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 is fine--it sounds like a carnival! A gypsy fair or something!-- but make sure you get off the train before it falls off the cliff into quasi-anonymous Teutonesque 1800s graveyard panorama or something....

Anyway, I was expecting more than I got from this book. I guess I was expecting more from Liszt, too, because you get a better impression of him when you don't dig through everything he ever wrote, which tells you something: don't scrape the bottom of the barrel. (Or at least be careful! Don't say I didn't warn you!) This is exactly what Searle did and urges you to do, however, and he does so himself relatively uncritically.... Maybe not *every* single piece is a masterwork, but, perhaps one out of every two or three. Why else would he expend his time so lavishly? So the book didn't become the favorite I was expecting; it became something more commonplace. To put it simply-- a glorified catalog. And just because any half-wit with a paper and pen, or, better still, an internet connection, can catalog things, and just because they have organization value (although mine are messy in certain ways anyway) doesn't mean that that's all there is to life, love and music..... I don't hate it, though. Just because it can be blissfully sparse on certain kinds of details and analysis here, there and everywhere--which ones of these is really good? which ones are really worth the effort? which ones were just glorified composition-practice and are better off forgotten?-- doesn't mean it meets my criteria of a truly bad book, a really messed up, deceiving kind of book. It's just a set of lists, with notes. In fact, I think it's actually about as good as the Peter Ames Carlin book on Brian Wilson, since I suppose thinking that only a guy's most uncharacteristic work is worthy of respect is about as faulty a notion as saying that everything that he dripped ink on turned to gold. Undercriticism, overcriticism--it's all oddly similar.... saying Yes to building music on snobby literary models is alot like saying No to your invitation to the surfer's hideaway.... and although people keep telling me that getting the respect of the nefarious gentlemen on the top looking for a theme song for the destruction of the world isn't your fault and doesn't make you guilty, well, it doesn't make you *better*, either.

But I don't think you could honestly get either a false or a true conception of it all just from the Searle numbers alone, so....

(8/10)… (altro)