Franz Liszt: The Final Years (Remastered) Reinbert de Leeuw

• Franz Liszt (1811 - 1886): The Final Years:
• 1 Liszt: Vier Kleine Klavierstücke 09:02
• 2 Liszt: 5 Kleine Klavierstücke, S.192: No. 5, Sospiri. Andante 03:33
• 3 Liszt: Bagatelle sans tonalité, S. 216a 03:13
• 4 Liszt: Wiegenlied. Chant du berceau, S. 198 04:02
• 5 Liszt: Nuages gris, S. 199 03:46
• 6 Liszt: Abschied (Russisches Volkslied), S. 251 03:20
• 7 Liszt: La lugubre gondola I, S. 200 No. 1 06:12
• 8 Liszt: La lugubre gondola II, S. 200 No. 2 10:09
• 9 Liszt: R.W. – Venezia, S. 201 (Homage to Richard Wagner) 04:49
• 10 Liszt: Unstern! (Sinistre), S. 208 08:25
• Total Runtime 56:31

Info zu Franz Liszt: The Final Years (Remastered)

“Franz Liszt - The Final Years” features pianist Reinbert de Leeuw in a program of the composer’s late works for piano solo, recorded in 1978.

Franz Liszt (1811-1886) was revered in his own time as a true devil's advocate, whose virtuoso piano playing set many a woman's heart racing. But above all, he was an innovator, whose ambition was to ‘hurl a spear into the infinite space of the future’. The Concertzender highlights Franz Liszt's life and work for two hours on Wednesday 2 December. At 20.00, Mathieu Heinrichs zooms in on his relationship with Clara and Robert Schumann, and from 21.00-22.00 in Panorama de Leeuw I focus on Liszt's late creative period.

Although Franz Liszt was born in Hungary, he spoke German. His father was steward at the court of the noble Esterházy family, where Joseph Haydn had been Kapellmeister for 30 years. Their castle was in western Hungary, in an area where German was mainly spoken, as was the case at Franz's primary school. After World War I, the area was assigned to Austria as ‘Burgenland’. But although Liszt would never learn to speak Hungarian, he was an ardent patriot, opposing Austrian rule and drawing inspiration from Hungarian folk music. Sometimes he even appeared on stage in Hungarian costume.

His father Adam was a deserving amateur pianist, who had attended Haydn's concerts and also got to know him personally. Once, when he played a piano concerto by Ferdinand Ries, little Franz sang the melodies flawlessly, upon which Adam decided to give him piano lessons. The boy took off like a rocket and from the age of nine performed for audiences, standing out not only for his amazing mastery of music by composers such as Bach and Mozart, but also for his talent for improvisation. Thus, the Pressburger Zeitung wrote in 1920: ‘His playing exceeds admiration and justifies the very highest expectations.’

After this, things moved quickly. The Liszt family moved to Vienna, where Franz was taught by Carl Czerny. The latter forced him to play all pieces by heart, which allowed him to spend his life performing the trickiest scores à vue. He soon became an admired keyboard lion, rivalling in popularity the spectacle violinist Niccolò Paganini. Not only because of his genius playing, but also because he innovated performance practice: he placed his grand piano sideways on the stage, so that the sound was projected directly into the hall and the audience had a view of his watery fingers. Liszt also developed the ‘symphonic poem’, a one-movement orchestral work that tells a story, such as Die Hunnenschlacht and Orpheus.

But Liszt's main achievement lies in his late compositions, which came about after he had been ordained in the lower priestly order. He became increasingly ascetic, said goodbye to virtuoso display and developed a language that, in its increasing dissonance, points ahead to Arnold Schönberg's atonality. Liszt himself valued these pieces, but his contemporaries dismissed them as inferior products of a decaying mind. His son-in-law Richard Wagner even spoke of ‘germinating madness’.

Compositions like Nuages gris and Bagatelle sans tonalité remained unpublished until the Liszt Society was founded in England in 1950. Via crucis, his impressive cycle on the crucifixion of Christ did not even appear in print until 1980. In our country, Reinbert de Leeuw and Toos Onderdenwijngaard were among the promoters of Liszt in the 1970s. In Panorama de Leeuw, I zoom in on this, with rarely heard recordings by Onderdenwijngaard and De Leeuw.

Reinbert de Leeuw, piano

Digitally remastered

Reinbert de Leeuw
In the field of modern and contemporary music, Reinbert de Leeuw (°1938) is a world renowned and highly respected musician. Born in Amsterdam, his musical activities cover a wide field: conductor, composer, and pianist. He conducts leading orchestras in Holland and the rest of Europe, as well as in the USA, Japan, and Australia. He has conducted many productions at the Netherlands Opera – most recently Andriessen’s Theatre of the World, which was performed both in Los Angeles and Amsterdam in 2016. His recordings as a pianist have won many prizes, including the Dutch Edison, the Premio della critica discografica Italiana, the Grand Prix of the Hungarian Liszt Society, and the Diapason D’Or, as well as the Edison Oeuvre Prize in 2008. June 2017 saw the launch of the CD box with the complete music for ensemble and choir by György Kurtág, recorded with the Asko|Schönberg Ensemble. Reinbert de Leeuw has received several prestigious awards and was appointed Honorary Doctor of the Utrecht University and Professor at the Leiden University.

He received an Honorary Doctorate of the University of Leuven (Belgium) in 2016 to honour his unabated effort to involve a wider audience in music of the 20th and 21st centuries. In 2008, he was made a Knight of the Order of the Netherlands Lion. Among his acclaimed arrangements and compositions are Im Wunderschönen Monat Mai, a cycle based on songs by Schubert and Schumann, and his work for Large Orchestra, The Nightly Wanderer, which premiered in Amsterdam. The USA premiere took place in April 2017 with the New World Symphony in Miami.

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