If the nineteenth-century piano concerto – part blend, part farrago of symphonic rigour, acrobatic virtuosity, dramatic theatrical effects, and world-weary soulful lyricism – traces its descent from Beethoven and Weber, what is the lineage of concertos for other instruments? In the case of the most prevalent non-keyboard variety, the violin concerto, a good argument could be made for the primacy of Giovanni Battista Viotti (1755–1824), whose twenty-nine concertos appeared between 1782 and 1817. Heir to the grand tradition of Baroque Italian violinists, Viotti was the prime mover in establishing the modern French violin school, the creation of which spanned the waning years of the ancien régime in Paris, where he worked between 1782 and 1792, and the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods. Tainted by persisting associations of his music with political ideologies, owing to his earlier successes at the Concert spirituel and service to Marie Antoinette, Viotti fled Paris; then, a few years later in London, where he appeared with Haydn at Salomon's Hanover Square Concerts, he was suspected of Jacobin views and deported under the Alien Act. When the restored Bourbon monarch Louis XVIII appointed the violinist director of the Paris Opéra in 1819, the way seemed cleared for his return to former glory. But months later, an assassin dispatched the Duke of Berry on the steps of the Opéra, and Viotti's position became untenable; he resigned within two years.

The early history of the concerto is intimately linked to the early history of the orchestra in the modern sense of that word: an ensemble in which each of the string parts is taken by several players. What instrumental compositions termed concerto written before 1700 have in common, despite their great variety of structure and style, is suitability for performance with doubled parts. This suitability was not – and should not today be misinterpreted as – an explicit compulsion to perform early concertos with massed strings, but it set the defining parameters. In brief, the nascent concerto acquired defining features that drew it apart from its parent genre, the sonata. By the first decade of the eighteenth century, it had made a sufficient impact on the musical scene to become the object of transcriptions for organ by J. S. Bach's cousin Johann Gottfried Walther. Bach continued the practice himself in the following decade, and the logical point of arrival was his Italian Concerto, published in 1735: a concerto for a solo instrument (two-manual harpsichord) that mimics a solo concerto for violin in every respect except scoring.

The piano concerto manifests a remarkable expansion during the nineteenth century in terms of the number of composers writing works in the form, and in the basic parameters of the genre itself; that is, the number of movements, size of the individual sections, instrumentation of the orchestra, and the technical demands placed on the soloist. The piano concerto is the most high-profile subspecies of the genre at this time. This chapter will investigate issues such as compositional responses to Mozart, and then Beethoven, the role of virtuosity, structural developments in the form, symphonic dimensions, and programmatic aspects of individual works.

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, composers continued to exploit the possibilities inherent in the piano concerto genre as codified by Mozart, whose twenty-three original concertos had all been published by 1806. A study of almost any concerto composed during the first third of the nineteenth century (and considerably later as well) reveals the profound influence of these works. Mozart's concertos were performed by nearly every composer in the early nineteenth century (as Beethoven's would be later in the century), creating a tradition which, of course, continues to this day. The nineteenth century also saw a dramatic increase in the number of municipal concert venues and music festivals associated with the rise of the middle class in the wake of the industrial revolution, in combination with the existing venues belonging to the nobility, cities, states and countries.

Some indication of the best-loved concertos and those most frequently performed in the concert hall in the earlier part of the twentieth century is given by Tovey in the works he selected for his famous Essays in Musical Analysis which appeared in the 1930s. These were originally written as programme notes for concerts given by the Reid Orchestra in Edinburgh that he founded in 1917. Tovey included a handful of concertos by Bach including the Concerto for Two Violins in D minor and the third and fourth Brandenburg Concertos, and by Handel just the Organ Concerto, Op. 7, No. 1. He selected thirteen works by Mozart including five piano concertos. There is the Cello Concerto in D major by Haydn. There are all the Beethoven concertos except the Piano Concerto in B flat, Op. 19, and all Brahms's works in the genre. There is Chopin's Piano Concerto in F minor, Op. 21, Schumann's three concertos – the Violin Concerto hadn't yet been discovered – and Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto, Op. 64. There are works by Saint-Saëns and Max Bruch and Glazunov. The twentieth-century works include Stanford's Clarinet Concerto, Elgar's Cello Concerto, Delius's Violin Concerto, and Sibelius's Violin Concerto. Tovey thinks that the number of ‘great works in the true concerto form is surprisingly small; far smaller than the number of true symphonies’. And yet you search in vain the early record catalogues, the pre-First World War listings, to find recordings of these comparatively few canonical masterpieces.

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.