1.1: Liszt's perspective
1.1.1: What does this mean to Liszt attitude toward performing works of Beethoven? The composer and predecessor whom Liszt admired dearly, “Beethoven is for Liszt a God before whom he bends his head.”9
Liszt’s approach to Beethoven’s music and musical performance in general is quite variable, ranging from strictly “playing the work so that “not one note was omitted; not one, added”10 to the contrary extreme to the point of receiving complaints for being too much of a virtuoso.11
The variety in his execution throughout his life and therefore, his approach to conveying musical Geist must be examined under one of his principles of music making. Liszt believed in the liberty (and potentially duty) as a performer to express within the framework of Hegel’s ‘subjective objectivity’, namely within the scope of musical properties based on the context of the transmission and his subject (audience). The following conversation occurred between him and the artist Jean-Joseph Bonaventure Laurens, who painted Liszt’s portrait in 1844 in Montpellier when the artist asked him during the session to play an organ fugue of J. S. Bach:
“How do you want me to play it?” [Liszt asked]
“How? . . . But, the way it ought to be played.” [Laurens replied]
“Here it is, to start with, as the author must have understood it, played it himself, or intended it to be played.” And Liszt played. And it was admirable, the very perfection itself of the classical style exactly in conformity with the original.
“Here it is a second time, as I feel it, with a slightly more picturesque movement, a more modern style and the effects demanded by an improved instrument.” And it was, with these nuances, different . . . but no less admirable.
“Finally, a third time, here it is the way I would play it for the public—to astonish, as a charlatan.”
And, lighting a cigar which passed at moments from between his lips to his fingers, executing with his ten fingers the part written for the organ pedals, and indulging in other tours de force and prestidigitation, he was prodigious, incredible, fabulous, and received gratefully with enthusiasm.12
This belief led him to perform what some people would call unnecessary bravura’s at times, possibly caused by his exaggerated judgement of what that specific audience may expect, and of course for the subjective matter of ‘good taste’. Liszt did come to regret (some of) these liberties in his later years around the 1870s.13 But nevertheless, I believe that it is safe to assume that Liszt believed in the legitimacy of all these types of performances and for them to be, in some ways, faithful to the Geist of the works. In fact, Newman deduced that Liszt viewed virtuosity as an essential role necessary in conveying composers’ intentions to their fullest.14
1.1.2: I would like to propose a possible solution that the Geist resides in the musical narrative, the contents universally understood subliminally which transcend the contextual difference between the initial expression and the recreation of the piece. This narrative dwells in the relationships from the micro scale of between the notes, to the level of relationships between gestures, syntax, structures, and so on; this concept leaves room for subjectivity from both the performer and the audience to experience “a different view of the spiritual conception.”
By applying this notion of Geist, I may paraphrase Türk’s as follows:
Whoever performs a composition so that the [Inner essences of expression, which can be universally recognized subjectively yet still parts of the perceptible representations of the same Will] even in every single passage, is most faithfully expressed (made perceptible [by virtue of Characters or other means that represent the artist’s honest, unconscious understanding of the essence15]) and that the tones become at the same time a language of feelings, of this person it is said that he is a good executant.
“Music is not something you can use words to describe, music is either in the air and you find it, or it is in the air, and you don’t find it.”16