Review Summary: Development Arrested.
Composer Disasterpiece Series No. 2
Franz Liszt commands a strong amount of respect in classical musical circles, and indeed there is a lot to respect about him. The man pushed the boundaries of both virtuosic piano composition, and, more importantly, tonality, as far as the early/middle Romantic era would allow. I should be more direct. I respect the heck out of Franz Liszt. As a musician, Liszt was the first bona fide “rock star”. I could write a 2000-word essay, easy, on Lisztomania alone. He’s one of the greatest pianists of all time, no lean feat. I mean, hey, after The Master himself, the guy was the first one able to perform Beethoven’s Hammerklavier sonata, previously considered unplayable. Moreover, he was a conductor, organist, arranger, and a key cog in the teaching lineage that stretched back to Beethoven
and still continues to this day. But, Liszt didn’t only live in the world of music. As a self-styled renaissance man, he was a prolific essayist, a biographer, nationalist, Franciscan Friar, and most importantly, an extremely generous philanthropist. He lived to the ripe old age of 74, and upon his death in 1886, had a lifetime of wonderful achievements to look back on.
With all that said, Liszt had a tin can ear (comparatively speaking, of course). That Liszt was a better arranger, brilliant I might add, than a composer of original works speaks to this idea. Indeed, much of his enormous musical output is full of 2nd class themes and shallow virtuosity. But, before I begin my diatribe on the piece at hand, I will give a strong nod to some of Liszt’s pieces that do not fall into this category: The Transcendental Etudes S. 139, The Grandes Études de Paganini S.141, The Consolations S. 172, and the beautiful Liebesträume No. 3 in Ab Major S. 541, which I one day hope to review. These pieces helped me get into classical music, I cherish them for that.
So let’s get down to brass tacks shall we? The Csárdás Macabre is part of a three-piece set composed in the last years of Liszt’s life, therefore a part of his late style, and is based on the Hungarian dance form of the same name. The Csárdás, Hungarian for tavern, originated in 18th century Hungary as part of a genre used as a recruitment tool for the Hungarian army. The main characteristics of the Csárdás deal with rhythm and tempo. For example, a typical Csárdás is in duple meter, begins slowly, and ends fastly.
Liszt’s Csárdás Macabre is a seven minutes long mind numbingly dull ultra-repetitive key bang.
Put less harshly, it’s an example musical childishness, but not in the sense that a child is unruly or stubborn, in the sense that a child’s brain isn’t fully developed. The piece begins with a blatant violation of the most basic rule of harmony, parallel fifths. Now, it should be noted that using parallel fifths, especially in the late romantic era, isn’t necessarily an egregious offense. It should indicate to you, however, what kind of music you’re about to hear. In the first two measures, Liszt goes back and forth between fifths on F-natural, F#, and G. The combination of fifths on three chromatic notes makes for even less melodiousness. The use of these pitches does not, in fact, qualify it as either melody or harmony. Again, this is a compositional technique, and in the hands of careful composers it can be utilized successfully. Liszt’s treatment, however, is the opposite of careful, it’s brutish.
The rhythm of this “theme” makes matters worse. Written at an allegro tempo in 2/4, the rhythm of the theme sees one half note in measures one and two each, a dotted quarter– eighth note rhythm in measure three, and two quarter notes in measure four. The rudimentary nature of the rhythm combined with the treatment of the parallel fifths makes it seem as if the theme stemmed from the mind of an eight-year-old having banged on the piano for a couple of minutes. While that may sound harsh, the music doesn’t lie. Most unfortunately, then, this is the music the entirety of the piece is based on, without exception.
After it’s finished, the theme repeats, this time in the same manner only beginning on G instead of F. This is basically it for the exposition of this quasi-sonata. He repeats the theme a bunch of times in nominally different rhythms and generally speeds up the tempo, but the general idea doesn’t change. Measure 35, which is the third measure in one of the repeats of the theme (having begun in 33), for example, sees four eighth notes instead of the dotted quarter/eighth, and chromatics above dissonant minor seconds instead of fifths. While the minor seconds do not break any formal musical rule, they do break the rule of what makes music sound good. The fifths return in the next measure, by the way.
Theme two is a bit more pleasant, it at least features arpeggios, rather than smushed chords, which allows the atmosphere to feel less blocky, and a descending melodic line from Eb to A, rather than chromatics oscillating above and below a single note. The third theme redeems the piece a bit more as well. Beneath left hand arpeggiated trills the right-hand alternates between sixths and fifths in eighth notes. There’s even a bit of a carnival-esque atmosphere, some much needed character which breathes life into the piece. Keep in mind, however, that this whole time Liszt is banging up and down the chromatic scale over and over in hollow octaves, fifths, and unisons.
The development, if you can even call it that, it’s more of a variation, sees the material rehashed in much of the same way that it already has been. The themes are there, but they don’t develop, they just vary in note duration and pitch. The section that ends the development is particularly harsh. Although there is a semblance of a melody, it’s just a series of repetitive fortissimo open chromatic octaves.
The recapitulation, again if you can even call it that, sees the themes compressed and cycled through in about ten seconds. This necessarily makes for much banging. On to the coda, Liszt works furiously towards the finish, about forty seconds away, running up and down the keyboard in left and right hand fortissimo eighth note octaves and tremolos. You would think that such a feverous pace would lead to a cathartic finish, but even the final chords of the piece are unsatisfactory; it sort of just ends without much flare, strange for a piece of this nature, in, once again, open chromatic octaves.
The only way to redeem S. 224 is through intellectualism and context. Yes, it is part of a lineage that both precedes the atonalists and Bela Bartok. Without S. 224 and Liszt’s late style the history of music may have been quite different. That’s how important Liszt is. Yes, it’s part of the nationalistic fervor the 19th century witnessed, and I will always support efforts to enlighten the world about peoples and cultures with whom they are unfamiliar. Yes, the piece poses some decently interesting harmonic questions, is the opening an augmented mediant appoggiatura or an actual tonic? Musically, however, S. 224 is so stunted that it’s duller than even some of the ***e Arnold Schoenberg and his ilk put out in the early 20th century, and who really cares about augmented mediants anyway? I wouldn’t have told Liszt not to compose the Csárdás Macabre, but I wouldn’t have told him to compose it either.
