Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Do you think Liszt lacks melody?

His accomplishment will surely be one of the great pianistic achievements. I have heard a handful of the pieces performed better than Howard did, but as a whole, his complete Liszt is staggeringly good. Thanks for sharing your uncle's experience!

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

I agree.

Many works? I realize it's just a matter of opinion, but could you give some examples?

It could well be, Jason, that he's refering to many of the ones he hasn't yet heard, so he'd have difficulty naming them. Give the kid a break!

Cheers!

Does anyone know if Leslie got into the guiness book of world records for the complete recording of Liszt? I think I read that somewhere...

But a fantastic achievement nonetheless.

COntrary to may people, my favourite Liszt pieces are the "less difficult" ... Chapelle de Guillaume Tell, Les cloches de Geneve ... the transcriptions are usually a bit too much for me.
It took me a while to get into Liszt but i realize maybe i was a bit biased; he was a great composer , probably overshadowed by the virtuoso.

I doubt he knew that more than five Liszt pieces existed.

I doubt that any motive but meanness exists for such a gratuitous insult.

Steven

Interesting you say something like this in light of your comments in another thread:

if you ask me Brahms lacks in melody too.

This thread has just gone from really bad to horrible.

I think we're getting lost in generalizations here. Sure, there's Liszt and Brahms out there that isn't terribly tuneful, but I can think of many examples of works by both composers where just the opposite is true. Liszt: B minor Sonata, Un Sospiro, Liebestraume, Benediction de Dieu dans las Solitude. Brahms: many of the intermezzi, esp'y all of the Op. 117 pieces, Op. 118 No.2, the middle of Op. 119 No. 2 the Rhapsodies (including Op. 119 no. 4) and the wonderful things he does (some of them very melodic) with a simple classical theme in the Handel Variations.

For my money, the all-time champ of the "Find the Melody" game is Schumann. Most of his stuff is nothing but dense harmonic textures and sometimes weird rhythms. But then consider Carnaval, the Abegg Variations, the F# major Romance, and Traumerei -- some of the greatest melodies ever written for piano. Most of the reason a composer is considered great boils down to memorable melodies. We just need to keep looking and listening until we find the ones we love.

Thank you for your thoughtful post, Phil. I agree with you completely. Another great melodist is Rachmaninoff. I was listening to Elyso Bolkvadze play his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini today with Jansung Kakhidze and the Tbilisi Symphony Orchestra. What a masterful work!

For Heaven's sake...what about the Consolations? Also Neil McKelvie has the most gorgeous video on youtube (Bostonpianoamateurs) of a French piece that Liszt wrote for voice. It is absolutely beautiful!!

I don't understand why people are attacking Ecthelion. He made it clear that he was describing his impressions of Liszt. He admitted his experience is limited. He does not deserve anyone's scorn. Suppose the Liszt enthusiasts were to try to enlighten him by offering a broader viewpoint and suggestions for listening, instead of disdain for venturing an opinion. Other readers of the thread might learn something too.

While the quality of Liszt's overall compositional output was inconsistent, when he was at his best he did, in fact, write many beautiful and memorable melodies. They're there if you take the time to explore his work and seek them out. One of the challenges with Liszt, however, is the overall difficulty of much of his piano music. Its not the kind of stuff that is easy to sightread - and often the "melodies" are buried in the complexity of the writing. The Transcendental Etudes are perfect examples.

Anyone showing a high-handed and completely misguided disdain for a major-league composer of whom they obviously have little understanding deserves lots of scorn. Besides which, the original post didn't even ask for other people's thoughts on the subject, but was just worded as an outright dismissal, with just the tiniest hint that the writer might admit to not really being in a position to hold the opinion that was expressed. The whole post is sort of troll-like, actually. And I really don't care a whole lot about attempting to "enlighten" someone exhibiting such a closed mind right off the bat - it usually isn't worth the effort. They need to grow up a lot first, no matter what their chronological age.

There, now do you understand a little better?

As has been pointed out, music doesn't depend on melody to be great. There are a zillion examples of exceptionally good music that isn't particularly "melodic", or if they do contain a melody, it isn't particularly distinguished, starting all the way back before Bach.

And Bach himself wrote a lot of great stuff without much melody - the very first prelude in the WTC being the classic example. The basic material of many of his fugues isn't really good melody - he just understood the contrapuntal potential of it and took it from there. Beethoven likewise wrote a great deal of excellent stuff based on banal melodic material, if there was any at all; it's practically a trademark of his style.

The thing with clear, defined (humable?) melodies in music, at least to me, is that they make you tire of the piece more quickly. A melody often becomes very predictable once you´ve learned it, while more complex layers of harmony does not in the same way. (I know this is a generalization, just thought I´d put the thought out there). I get utterly sick of playing very melodic pieces by for instance Mozart, but spend lots more time exploring and discovering the harmonic structure in some of Liszt´s works. To each his own.