INDEX OF THE VOLUME
CLAUDE KNEPPER, Y a-t-il une vie après Franz Liszt? Le cas Olga Janina
MAURIZIO GIANI, La lettera di Richard Wagner sui poemi sinfonici di Franz Liszt (1857). Traduzione e commento
FRANCESCO ESPOSITO, «Liszt al rovescio»: la difficile relazione del pianismo portoghese di metà Ottocento con i modelli stranieri
ANNA QUARANTA, Cronache dall’Ottocento, fra trionfi pianistici e avventure operistiche. Nuovi documenti inediti di Sigismund Thalberg
AUTOGRAFI
ANNA RITA ADDESSI, Tre autografi inediti di Manuel de Falla
RECENSIONI
ABSTRACTS
CLAUDE KNEPPER, Y a-t-il une vie après Franz Liszt? Le cas Olga Janina
The young pupil of Liszt, Olga Janina, was the cause of several scandals (murder attempt on Liszt in 1871, publication of her Souvenirs d’une Cosaque from 1874 to 1878) that contributed to darken the reputation of the musician in the last part of his life. Therefore almost all the biographers of Liszt have been very caustic with her, both from a human point of view and artistic.
The time had come to undertake a serious biographical research, that is to say, free from hagiographic bias and based on the examination of reliable documentary sources. This research has led to the correction of most of the many errors, commonplaces and hasty judgments that have been uttered about Olga until today. It has also shed light on the artistic and adventurous life that Olga led after the death of Liszt, a life hitherto unknown but which lasted until the eve of World War I.
Richard Wagner’s essay “On Franz Liszt’s Symphonic Poems”, which appears here for the first time in Italian translation, with an introduction and commentary, was originally a letter written on February 15, 1857, from Zürich to [Antonia Pauline] Marie zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, the daughter of Liszt’s companion, Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein.
The impulse for this essay was the visit Franz Liszt paid to Wagner in the Swiss city in October-November of the previous year. In those weeks he would play for his friend some of his newly-composed symphonic poems. The great impression that these works made on Wagner, who until that time had maintained a cool and reserved attitude toward programme music, drove him to reconsider his own aesthetic hypotheses, and to write the letter to Princess Marie, which was then published with some adaptations in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik for April l0th of that year, and later reprinted in Wagner’s Gesammelte Schriften.
The present translation contains the text published in the Zeitschrift, as well as the suppressed passages of the first version. In contrast to Eduard Hanslick, the great advocate of “absolute music”, Wagner refutes the very idea that something like that could exist: «Nothing is less absolute – he writes – (as to its appearance in Life, of course) than Music, and the champions of an Absolute Music evidently don’t know what they’re talking about». According to Wagner, all music borrows its form from either bodily motion (in dance) or spoken verse. The traditional symphony, he says, owes its articulation to the limited dialectics of change, which follows the structure: lively motion – softer, quieter period – repetition of the livelier motion. But Wagner now sees in Liszt’s symphonic poems a creative alteration of the old forms, which enables the symphonic movement to represent dramatic development, attaining thereby a greater force of expression. The influence of Liszt the composer can be traced not only in Wagner’s mature aesthetic writings, but in his music also. On December 1856, he began working again on the hitherto unfinished Siegfried; and the first draft of the score shows, characteristically, a completely new development of the orchestral part, where one finds a true “system of musical metaphors”, absent in the preceding dramas of the Ring, which can be connected, in a more or less direct manner, to the thematic organisation of Lisztian orchestral works.
The study of the presence of foreign musicians in Nineteenth century Lisbon can reveal new data on their activities as well as provide a vantage point for understanding the musical life of the Portuguese capital. Such is the case with the controversy generated by Liszt’s visit to Portugal, which throws into relief some peculiar aspects of the musical system in Lisbon – namely the huge role played by its amateurs and, above all, the radicalised corporatism of its professional musicians. The self-referential system set up by the class of local musicians sought to play down the value and erase the traces of Liszt’s pianism, thereby preventing not only a comparison with the then-prevailing pianism of the city, but also an updating of the local pianistic school.
If elsewhere the presence of the Hungarian musician left behind ‘legions of pupils’ or at least pianists who were inspired by his model, none of this happened in Lisbon, where his sojourn in the city continued to be cited as a prestigious worldly event, but where, for many years, his pianism continued to be practically ignored.
The attitude of insecurity shown by the prevailing pianism of the capital also seems to be the source of isolation of those few Portuguese musicians who possessed up-to-date concert skills and a modern mentality. It may also explain the controversies that resulted when some of the other most renowned pianists of Europe, both before and after Liszt’s visit, likewise came to Lisbon.
The aim of the article is to present and discuss five hitherto unpublished autographs by Sigismund Thalberg – four letters and a small piano piece – recently acquired by the Istituto Liszt, which belong to three periods – and refer to three distinct activities: performer, piano and opera composer – in the career of Thalberg. The two oldest letters date from March 1841, and are addressed to Franz Glöggl, at that time archivist and shipping agent of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna: they show the celebrated virtuoso engaged in preparations for a concert to be given in the Austrian capital in the following April; details regarding programme, tickets and technical questions related to the piano chosen for the performance are discussed.
The piano piece is an Andante composed in Naples on March 10, 1844 and dedicated to a “Prince Lanza”, probably from the Sicilian house Lanza, whose precise identity still remains uncertain (there are at least three members of the family who, for chronological reasons, could have been the dedicatee). The piece is a very small and unpretentious one: in a span of only 16 bars, the right hand develops an extremely simple melody in the middle register, while the left unfolds a series of quiet, uniform arpeggios.
Finally, the last three letters (autumn 1853 to spring 1854) refer to the creation of Thalberg’s second and final opera, Cristina di Svezia, based on a libretto by the poet Felice Romani, the most important librettist of the first half of the 19th Century. (A survey of the reviews appearing in music periodicals of that time shows that the première of Cristina di Svezia, which took place in Vienna on June 22, 1855 at the Kärntnertortheater, was not so positive as Thalberg wrote to Romani, but ended in a total fiasco.)
AUTOGRAFI
ANNA RITA ADDESSI, Tre autografi inediti di Manuel de Falla
The archive of the Fondazione Istituto Liszt of Bologna helds three unpublished autographs of the Cádiz-born composer Manuel de Falla:
1. A letter to Ricardo Viñes
2. A postcard addressed to George Jean-Aubry
3. A dedicatory document, with a fragment of musical score.
In this article, the documents are dated and interpreted within the artistic and personal life of Manuel de Falla, on the basis of researches made at the Archivo Manuel de Falla in Granada.
The letter and the postcard are analysed within the artistic and cultural relationships Falla had mainly with Paris, in the context of the aesthetic, political and cultural Spanish avant-garde of the first half of the Twentieth century.
The dedicatory document gives four bars of El retablo de Maese Pedro, where Falla quotes the Canción del fuego fatuo, from his earlier ballet Amor Brujo: this self-quotation is interpreted as a ‘musical password’ left by Falla to the unknown recipient of the dedicatory document.
RECENSIONI
DOROTHEA REDEPENNING
Hamburger Klára, Franz Liszt. Leben und Werk, Böhlau, Weimar und Wien, 2010
Serge Gut, Franz Liszt, Studio, Sinzig, 2011
Brigitte Pasquet Gotti, Pocknell Pauline, Haine Malou, Dufetel Nicolas (éds.), Lettres de Franz Liszt à la Princesse Marie de Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst née de Sayn-Wittgenstein, Vrin, Belgique, 2010
MARIATERESA STORINO
Le Diagon-Jacquin Laurence, La musique de Liszt et les arts visuels, Hermann, Paris, 2009
Le Diagon-Jacquin Laurence, Liszt en Bourgogne, EUD, Dijon, 2011