Yeah Liszt was admittedly something of a show-off in his early career. Chopin said so, Mendelssohn said so , Clara Schumann said so, and so did his own former teacher Carl Czerny. But at least he was a good show off, and had something to back it up with. Given his later contributions to music through his patronage and compositions, I think he has earned our forgiveness.👏
I know I say this quite often but maybe not even often enough. Thank you so much when for the work you do. It is beyond measure and price. So appreciated.
Great and convincing video, Wim. Maybe it´s a good idea to get in touch with the guys from the Liszt House in Weimar. If anyone knows what Liszt taught his students then it´s them. They have also tons of original documents.
I found an interview of Moritz Rosenthal (a pupil of Liszt) where he said that when he played the Paraphrase (?) of Don Giovanni before Liszt, Liszt was impressed by his speed. Rosenthal then sait that if he played it the same way today (so back in 1920 or something), the public would kind of moke him. I put the link of the article here : etudemagazine.com/etude/1924/04/moritz-rosenthal---if-franz-liszt-should-come-back-again.html
"Take, for instance, Liszt’s own Don Juan Fantasie, considered by some to be among the most difficult compositions ever written for the piano. In the Champagne Song it was the custom to play much slower than the air is sung upon the stage. When I was twenty-two years old I played this for Liszt and he marveled at my speed. If I should play it to-day at the same speed as I played it then, people would think me to be very cautious-perhaps losing my powers" This is the exact quote. It's very interesting indeed. And I'm not a "believer" of the whole-beat theory (*but* I still have significant doubts because there are many things that doesn't make sense in double-beat or "modern" way of using the metronome.
Tempi have been slowing down basically since the mid 1800s. Because playing slowly apparently shows how deep and profound we are - all very noble and admirable to be sure, but...also a little boring, unfortunately.
I agree it is an important quote thank you. However based on the enormous integrity of Liszt all three performances were I am sure dazzling. Each with a timeless quality. His performance for the audience was a marriage or consummation of a unique character. Liszt became the audience and together flew to new heights. All concerts of today are just distant echos. Liszts live concerts were enhanced also by virtue of it not being recorded. It was truly once in a lifetime experience. After a Liszt or Paganini concert you were destroy.
The painter J.A.D. Ingres(very great) who was also a passionate fiddler went to a Paganini concert…stamped his feet and shouted “Traitre” and stomped out…. This is all presumably after Ingres’s fabulous portrait drawing of said fiddler….😅
I for one have to say that these types of quotes and the whole beat research that yourself and Lorenz have done, has significantly improved my love of music. Not just Bach and Beethoven and Mozart whom I loved already, but also regarding Liszt and Chopin. I was a bit of a Glenn Gould type in not caring for either of them much thinking that their music was purely just technicality on show for its own amusement. But the more that your channel has removed that aspect of speed and pure virtuosity I can now appreciate Liszt and Chopin's compositions as actual music. Both well informed music and that which continues from the previous eras. And I want to thank you a lot for doing that.
I think that Liszt was most at home in style #2. I think that it wasn't so much faster, as more romantic and expressive. This was accomplished by varying the tempo with rubato, varying the tone with dynamics, and bringing out the melodies by playing them more strongly than the other notes, all to express the emotions of the music. He was prone to elaborating, adding extra notes as a flourish or variation.
"Setting aside your own ego" is such a great way to look at what we ought to do at the piano. Lately it is almost like meditation, leaving my "self" and embodying something from the composer's mind. Not sure how to explain it properly.
I once had a conversation with Valentina where I asked her whether I should pursue music and my hopes for that career (I chose not to, music is a hobby for me and I enjoy it this way much more) and she gave me a very enlightening response: you should only pursue music if you value it as a social experience and by that I don't even mean playing in particular, I mean pretty much any way of sharing music with others, even by simply talking about it. Music is always meant as an expression, meaning it must reach someone, it cannot live without a listener. Beethoven himself encourages this idea with the quote that music should strike fire in the hearts of men and bring tears to the eyes of women. So it is safe to say, composers cannot simply compose for themselves disregarding everything else. That being said, we live in fundamentally different times than Liszt and Beethoven. Today, pretty much everyone can (and should) share their art via the internet and with a bit of effort build a large fanbase. These fanbases are individual and that is the main difference. In Liszt and Beethoven's times there was only one grand audience with similar standards. If they demanded speed, then they would get speed. Musicians, not having today's luxury had to bow or be cursed to obscurity or worse (Rachmaninoff was driven to insanity despite it not being his fault). Even today, this principle applies. Do not underestimate how much followers the likes of Lisitsa would lose if they suddenly started playing their music much slower. On the other hand, she is very often criticized for playing too fast, even by people not aware of this theory. In the end, there can be as many interpretations as there can be audiences. Historical and correct cannot be confused in this context
Your description of the lunch is why I revere Liszt as one of the greatest musicians - he could do it all. That is where very few top pianists of our times can follow, they are mostly reproduction machines.
VERY excited for this. As a liszt fanatic I think we would be very disappointed/confused if we heard him play today. I imagine similar to Ervin Nyiregyházi
I just want to say that I went to sleep the other night listening to your duo piano of Beethovens 5th symphony, and woke up during the finale of the last movement bewildered and terrified from what I was hearing. Very powerful.
even the Carnegie gods need that youtube speed button to make your claim come through. If you would really have looked into the fascinating world of authentic MMs you'd know they would need it even... desperately
"Pittoresque" may not necessarily mean "faster" but one thing I have seen throughout my life (50 years now), and that is: people (meaning the audience), ALWAYS equate faster to "better" or "masterful". Whereas slow is somehow related to "less impressive" or to "study velocity" to put it that way. Also, It's my recurrent observation that people tend to elaborate stereotypes around vague words such as "feeling" associating it with slow passages where the musician goes as hyper-gestural as Jim Carrey. In people minds', if you play faster, you are advanced. That I have seen, and it makes perfect sense to me with the idea that that is what the musicians back in the XIX century would have thought as well. I can't imagine those young performers saying "Oh, we must be advanced, and look as such, let's play slower". Oh, c'mon!
You're a guitar player? Then you know that somehow the guitar community is much wiser than the classical audience. Fast guitar playing is seen as nice optional but not necessity. Just look at John Mayer - mega successful blues player and singer and no virtuoso in the classical sense.
Just for myself... I think i'm between category I and II. For me it is important to know what the composer wishes, but as music is also a way of expressing yourself, I think that adding personal touches is not only unavoidable, but also an important aspect of being a musician. That's also what Liszt did: in option 2, he played it with his own opinion, alongside the composers wishes.
This bit about the adjustment of tempo to the modern instrument is super interesting. It reminds me of conversations I’ve had with a teacher of mine about tempi in the Bach Suites. It’s true that the baroque cello’s low strings “ring” longer, making pedal effects such as the Suite 5 prelude more convincing. He advocated for a quicker tempo to compensate for this, and I find the quicker Suite 5 more convincing than the prevailing performing tradition of playing it very slow. Did the piano follow a similar trend where the modern instruments just don’t have as much natural ring? That could be a reason why Liszt perhaps played certain Bach things faster. Overall moral of the story though: performing traditions have their pitfalls.
Thank you, I have been wrestling this question "What tempo shall I take for this situation?" - and it is a serious and exhausting one for a professional pianist and organist, and I never talked it out with anyone. I enjoyed working with every director who gave me the opportunity to play music with them. However, concerning performance skills, think of this: the acoustics in the room...especially in an acoustically delayed situation such as pipe organs, - playing before the beat - before the sound is heard - one must be sure where the beat lands just for starters, and that it is the director's beat, not one's own. The audiences expectations always helps one play on the side of exuberance. Now in my dotage, I thrill at the Adagios and lyric solos, no longer needing an audience to please. I play what I want at the speed I want. My resolution to the problem of tempo is to play at the speed for the problem to be solved. I love the movement of chords, and I will go slower to savor the moment with that chord. And yes, my faster tempos are slower now, and even more enjoyable.
This fits nicely with an interesting book called Noise: A Political Economy of Music, by Jacques Attali (1977), which seeks to show how classical music was shaped by commercialism as composers and performers continually raised standards of difficulty in order to widen the chasm between professional musicians and the audiences which supported their efforts.
This would mach with the family testimonial that a viewer kindly left in the comments a few days ago: His students trying to play as they heard him play on stage, and Liszt trying to slow them down... I bet some students were left with the idea that he was trying to repress future competition...
That’s a cool find Wim. I think maybe that Czerny’s Bach edition fall into the 2nd category, using more modern fingering and articulation, i.e. legato, but still in the spirit of how Bach was originally played, maybe even the tempi are close to the original. In the preface to the WTC he mentions that Allegro was slower in Baroque times, so he was at least aware of how Baroque music was played. I have read in Turk, CPE Bach, and a quote about Mozart, that music was played in a more non-legato way, I think the word choppy is used about Mozart’s playing. There are other quotes but I can’t remember them. With the slower tempi in Bach you are allowed more articulation choices especially in 16ths, you can even use slur patterns based on what is seen in his string works. Like you have said, if Czerny came back and gave us a lecture on Baroque performance practice, all the biggest names in music would be there, conductors and performers. So why ignore his tempi and fingerings from his Bach editions, it makes no sense to me. He gave m.m. for all of the Bach works in his editions, why would they not be accurate? Also, he states that his fingering, articulation, & tempi are in the spirit of how Beethoven played these works, I think Beethoven knew a thing or two about playing Bach, and he lived even closer to the Baroque tradition.
Wonderful, insightful, brilliant. One comment i recall that my mother's teacher (Josè vianna de Motta) had said to her was that Liszt could be all things at the piano.
On the matter of tempo, some musicians in this present era are still guilty of playing faster than the composer intended - simply because they can, and they wish to demonstrate this to an admiring audience. I am constantly hearing examples of this act of artistic vandalism! I recently heard a new recording of a Mozart piano concerto strummed thought at break-neck speed where all the subtlety and beauty was lost and trampled upon by the performer's efforts to demonstrate their superiority of dexterity and sheer virtuosity. Perhaps with some composers this may add some extra interest to a pedestrian composition, but there are countless examples I have heard where this is an act of pure destruction! Thank you for your interesting research into this problem - which I fear will always be with us, owing to a serious deficiency in human musical preferences..
Wonderful video, and the insights of Liszt are as true today as they were apparently in his time. It is likely therefore that the composers knew this as well, and were not surprised that their music might very well be performed in the manner of option 2 or 3. I love that you are preserving and demonstrating what option 1 was, as without it the other options would lack context. This is one of the most important videos you've made on tempo reconstruction to me because it addresses all 3 critical aspects about how a composition travels from the composer to the performer and to the audience. Thank you for this marvelous video and the work you do to educate us. Makes me wonder if composers of that time were shrewd enough to write down excessively slow tempos knowing that their music would be played faster than what was indicated, as was the custom.
I noticed 50 years ago that Claudio Arrau played Beethoven a little slowrer than the other great concert artists. I knew what I heard was the absolute perfection of Beethoven.
Being composer myself I was shocked when I were at Royal Academy that musicians of today are only parrots. Musicians of the past were much more creative and skilled. They understood music on a deeper level. Less ortodox more inovative. I feel like it starts to come back a little but still far away. I think musicians in 18 and 19 century were something like jazz musicians, improvising and never play the same way. They were searching after the groove and feeling in music. They could play extremely fast, even faster than today but as a contrast the slow part could be extremely slow too. They were just more artistic than most musicians today
The late 19th century and early 20th century were a time of pianists who played increasingly loud and fast, and who also each played with a distinct style, like modern jazz, rock and pop performers. People wanted to hear the famous pianist's interpretation, not the composer's original idea. At the same time, to play louder, they raised their stools ever higher, so they could pound the keys harder. The late 20th century was all about getting rid of that and going back to the composer's original intent (although usually with style #2, which is more interesting).
One must humbly ask what is the word “charlatan”. Keep in mind being well read was a source of dignity unlike today. Letting Liszt’s score speak to us there is perhaps not a measure of music that was not an effect to surprise and mislead the ear to the unexpected. Indeed a high art and true art of a “charlatan”. Liszt as you are aware loved gypsy musicians who actually mimicked virtuosity with no real skill. Liszt made this into an art. Never was there an insincere bone in Liszt body. Liszt considered the word charlatan a compliment. It’s a different word today. Today words are more ridged due to illiteracy.
It did blew me out of the chair! - even though you have already given us so many many important evidences, which supported your search for authentic reconstruction of those composers' real intentions - but this one... this is something else again, because now you have brought the ultimate evidence: the admitting of the truth as given by a composer of that time. who was also a virtuoso-player himself. This is a shocking evidence and a shocking testimony by one of the greatest virtuosi of all times! In addition, no one can say now: "oh, the composer could not perform his own compositions because he is not good enough as a player and there are players that could deliver his intentions better than him"! In older times, the composer and the performer were both in one man, and sometimes (like in Bach's case) they were also tuners and even instrument's builders. There was a process during the years, of separating it to 2 different professions, and at the same time, began a process of concert-halls big enough for the public (opening this kind of music to the middle-class, whereas before it was meant for the aristocrats only). A kind of "Bread and circuses"... That is the beginning-point of the growing need to meet the demands of the masses, hence - virtuosity. But "in vino veritas", as they say - after a good meal he confessed... And when these demands conflicted with his artistic values, he could not tolerate it anymore and he left the stage. You were right to divide the problem (and its solutions) to 3 comprehensive parts/stages. It made the whole situation very clear. Thanks for this (again) unique and so important upload.
Liszt has always been my absolutely favorite composer, and he always will be the greatest for me. His music is so much deeper than it is usually represented. It is very sad that his masterpieces are often used to show off or as a horse races exercises. I understand that a lot of his pieces were meant to be played in a fast tempo and for me it goes without saying. However I suppose that speed and technique should serve the piece, but not vice versa. Because pianist's technique is a tool that allows him/her to fulfill the intention of the composer and at the same time to interpret a piece in his/her own way, to find a harmony between being an interpreter of composers views and being an artist himself/herself. Technique should serve a purpose of the proper interpretation of the piece, but unfortunately, these days his masterpieces often used simply as an opportunity to show a technique, without paying proper attention to melody, colours of harmony and a story written by means of a sound.
I'd love to find out that the Liszt playing that led me to not like most of his music was a distortion of music I'd like if it were played at a different tempo he wanted.
The lay crowd has no clue that it is actually very difficult to play at a slow tempo and keep it steady. Let's be honest, 90% of people at concerts have no clue what constitutes good. They read what critics say and they go with that. People never gave a passing thought to the paintings of Van Gogh, until experts told them they are good. Now people go to museums to admire them, not because they themselves reached the conclusion that those paintings are good, but just because it is common knowledge that Van Gogh was a master. Fast playing is a no brainer. It impresses and astonishes.
Wim, this is important in two ways: 1) What is the science in art (and vis versa), and 2) What is the spiritual connection as oppose to the lower emotions conveyed in an interrupted piece, because there is a difference in quality? As Socrates says in the Republic that the music that you listen to is the person that you'll become! Therefore, if music can make a person human, how is that music played?
@@davidgonzalez-herrera2980 I do agree, which is why our Constitution says that the Congress Promote the Useful Sciences and Arts, which are not separate!
@@davidgonzalez-herrera2980 I recommend reading Lyndon LaRouche on "Think Like Beethoven!" www.bookdepository.com/Think-Like-Beethoven-Lyndon-H-Larouche-Jr/9781655185649
Very insightful and interesting in what category does improvising over a song's chord progression or melody fall? And i'm not talking about playing fast, i just mean inventing based on some specific piece/song theme, wich could really be slow or fast or whatever..thanks
I am interested in this notion that many performers in the 19th century may have been compelled to "choose option 3" and that this would lead in some cases to counter-reactions--for instance, it may have played a significant part in Liszt choosing to leave the concert stage partway through his own long (19th century) life. What about the pressure on slightly younger composers, the ones who like Liszt were also excellent performers? Brahms is foremost in my mind: as a young pianist he presumably knew the option "to astonish the audience is your primary goal" and however much he acceded to this pressure, or maybe conversely fought against it--what about when he COMPOSED? Did Brahms want to ward off artists who would warp and alter the intentions of his own music via "astonishing" performances, and if so, HOW did Brahms adopt alternate compositional strategies and methods to forestall or at least limit this from happening?
We have built an incredible aura around big-name composers; if, by some miracle, had the chance to listen to Beethoven himself, we may not be very impressed. We have so many options to choose from today and we are spoiled. Many approaches to musical interpreting. Are composers really good interpreters? Pianists recreate those works. Composer’s intents are just ink on paper without the interpreter. If the composer were alive, he may even alter his own score after further consideration. As a translator, I always repurpose a text depending on the audience. The source text or the score don’t represent PERFECTION all the time. They may be improved upon. They may need more to come to life. So, in that respect, I agree with Liszt’s take. The audience is not always musically educated to discern what we think is the “authentic version”. I personally do not care for the authentic version as long as it musically makes sense. However, I get pissed off when a composers’ intents are disregarded and it leads to the work losing its organic integrity -and it just sounds BAD. I object to playing too fast when the melodic lines are blurred. Liszt, despite the fame he enjoyed, decried the situation of musician-artists in society; he hated the “amuser” role bestowed upon them by society’s prejudices. There is no denying he played to please the audience, but let us not lose perspective. He did so also to democratize ART for the masses. He enchanted people. He soon realized that it doesn’t contribute to defending the TRUE ROLE of artists in society and that is to “enlighten”, educate and elevate the public.
All that really matters in piano performance is what the audience is willing to pay for. If the non-musicians in the audience cared so much about the composer's original intent, why would they buy tickets to see Mozart performed by anyone other than Wolfgang Amadeus himself? There's a similar phenomenon today with modern music when it comes to controversial lyrics and lyrics being open to interpretation. We see music getting banned in the USA and songwriters getting blacklisted because they weren't 100% exactly clear about their intent. Kinda ridiculous if you ask me! Intent is useful information, but like you said it's about balancing that with audience appeal.
Here is an excerpt from Chopin's biography by Allan Walker: "Chopin’s reputation as a concert pianist presents us with a paradox. It rested on fewer than twenty public concerts across his lifetime, in which with one or two exceptions he played only his own music. In earlier years he performed before large audiences in Warsaw, Vienna, Munich, and Paris; later on he played in Edinburgh, Manchester, and Glasgow. He faced his largest audience in Manchester during the closing months of his life, where twelve hundred people heard him play. Yet he was a reluctant virtuoso. He once admitted to Liszt, “I am not fitted to give concerts, the public frightens me; I feel suffocated by its panting breath, paralyzed by its curious glance, mute before those unknown faces.”11 His sound was small and it often failed to carry in large halls. It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that this was the result of his weakened physical condition. Chopin despised the hard-hitting virtuosi of his time, and often likened their forced, rough sounds to those of a dog’s mindless barking. His natural inclination was for infinite gradations of sound, and myriad colors."
@@mehdiadlany Smart people have always been outnumbered by stupid people. It's a product of civilization. Without it there would no room for stupideness to reproduce and become the majority.
"Charlatans today neither improvise nor encourage movement from their audiences [...] 'notes inégales' outside of a baroque or pop context are considered vulgar"
You think that there were no musicians of the 19th century who didn’t pander to the audience?? How about Chopin, who rarely played concerts? You think he had to speed up his pieces to amaze the audience? No way, he played his pieces as written, and he even was extremely rude to Liszt after Liszt performed one of his Nocturnes with a lot of added embellishments to wow the audience (as Liszt liked to do). Chopin said something like, play what’s written or don’t play at all.
I understand that you want expression and meaning in the music rather than flare and speed, but the problem is - why would I pay to see a performance that anyone can do, people want to see something truly impressive AND something that most people cannot perform. There something about experiencing something that is almost unattainable by the average person that is truly amazing to see. Although I do agree that there should also be the essence of the original intent. Hard to work out how to do that, it’s kind of one or the other.
"a performance that anyone can do" -- you make it sound like speed is the only thing that sets a great pianist apart from the amateur. I can play many Bach fugues. Often I can play them as fast as Glenn Gould does. But can I play them as Gould does? Very far from it.
Xī sāi luó What do you think is more likely. To refine a piece that you can already play and perfect it to your own expressive liking OR to play a piece that requires insanely difficult technique that requires years and years of practicing in order to be able to play it 100% accurately.
That doesn't make sense. What professional musicians play won't be played by most people in the audience, musically educated members in an audience, a niche minority, will agonize about the minute details of a performance anyway, one can't please everyone on that niche audience.
Maybe this was done on purpose by the Jesuits(or they were somehow involved)?Through their education system? I've heard barenboim say something about "order from chaos" which is Jesuit/Catholic social teaching(not saying he's involved just that he may have learned that phrase because it's one of those things that is repeated alot so other people start saying it (like how "common good" is often repeated and used as a trojan horse to take people's rights). It makes sense seeing all the problems it (double tempo)has caused.. and the fact that it turns beautiful music into an enervating frenzy of notes.(or it could have easily happened because masses listened to charlatan performances from musicians that knew but didn't care.) I think we are very fortunate to have the opportunity to listen to this music..btw "1844" was also an important date in prophetic history...but yeah thank you wim and everyone else involved!
@@davidgonzalez-herrera2980 cool lol idk I just thought since the Jesuits(with the help of the evil angels) pretty much run everything why wouldn't they do something to destroy classical music..given the fact that alot of it was made for praising God, getting people to play it fast for self-exaltation would be a way of desecrating the music.
@@davidgonzalez-herrera2980 ua-cam.com/video/2k2T1WVZsyg/v-deo.html here's a video that explains more about how the Jesuits run the world with quotes that are "straight from the horses mouth" as some might say.
@@davidgonzalez-herrera2980 if you think about it if you were a Jesuit it would be easy to get all the important prominent people to begin teaching the wrong way and soon everyone would do it that way and people would think the old way is ridiculous and make up all types of arguments to defend it because it's embarrassing to admit that they were decieved and not in the right.. kindof like how the majority of Bible believers keep Sunday holy even though it basically goes against what the bible says, and the few that still keep the Sabbath on the 7th day of the week are seen as legalistic and restrictive.. and thus the sabbath is desecrated and the day of the sun is exalted thus linking it to baal(sun/nature) worship and thus they take nature's creator out of the picture. But yeah just some food for thought.. sorry bout the long paragraph it's just that if I were other people I'd want to be aware of what's really going on. Even though it might not be exactly the case for wbpm it's not unlikely..
The content from this video marks a significant departure from the tone if not substance of much of Wim's previous discussion on tempo. The ideas presented in this video - that tempos and speeds have changed over time, that performers change speeds and approaches depending on environments (different audience 'types', or different acoustic environments), that there is a 'sportive element' in music performance (see: Dmitri Mitropoulos, via Lenny Bernstein) - are not new ideas, or at this point terribly controversial ones. The decisions that a performer makes with regard to these topics are a fundamental part of what makes up their artistry - for better or (sometimes) for worse. Most (all?) of the previous presentations on this channel on speed/tempo have presented the topic purely in terms of metronome speeds, and in a way which gives us only a completely binary choice: Whole Beat or Double Beat, with no consideration of anything in-between. This is a significant limitation of this approach. We're left with a choice of speeds either very fast (even unplayably fast) or very slow (many would say, too slow). Just as Goldilocks (of the fairy tale) wasn't satisfied with her first two choices (too hot or too cold, too much or too little), being restricted to only these two extreme choices when it comes to tempo can be similarly unsatisfying. Perhaps we need to consider that the metronome is a guide, but not the sole or ultimate determinant of performance practice. This approach would be much more in keeping with the message from Liszt's comments that are discussed in this video.
Well, you just proved your critics' point. Playing as fast as possible is historically correct performance practice. Playing whole beat is a scholarly pursuit and as early as 1821 was being relegated to the dust bin. And by 1844, was completely tossed. People pay to hear pyrotechnics. Liszt resented it but clearly he understood what was required of him. And he was wealthy enough to step away from it. Modern concert artists don't have that luxury. This isn't a criticism, it's a fact.
Well said. Just look at how Lang Lang differs from his CD recordings to live concerts, and compare to those of Marc Andre Hamelin. MAH is clearly the better pianist, but arguably not as financially successful as the show-offs.
Yes, I guess you could call it a historically correct tempo. But Wim understands that phrase a little differently, as he explains in this video. What did the COMPOSER have in mind before writing their piece down on a sheet of paper?
I think we should be open for the idea that there was more than one kind of audience. It is something that you can understand in the context of the video where Liszt plays for a circle of friends and aquaintances who are open for different options and who like different versions. We know about Chopin that he prefered playing in the salon to giving concerts in big halls. You can see differences also in today's audiences where some artists are filling the big halls and do a lot of crowd-pleasing stuff while other follow more their own instincts, play the music they like in their own way, no matter if they get rich / famous or not. Some also combine the concert life with f.ex. teaching. Not everybody is a Valentina Lisitsa or an André Rieu. :-)
With this addition: it was NOT what the composer's wanted. And that is exactly what we want to reconstruct here, not the Carnegy hall performances of back then.
Last month I posted this performance of the Revolutionary Etude, but in C Major. ua-cam.com/video/Tk3SDubpFsE/v-deo.html Here’s what’s interesting to me: this performance is about 25% slower than modern conventional performances, which are in turn about 25% slower than the single beat interpretation of the metronome mark. I played it more slowly because I needed more time to think about where to put my fingers, because most of my time learning the piece was in C Minor. As a result, this performance is pretty close to the WBMP interpretation. Maybe 15% faster. Of all the people who commented about the video (on UA-cam as well as other platforms), not a single person remarked about the tempo being slow. Dozens of people commented about the novel sound, no one commented on tempo at all. I take this as evidence that there’s nothing “slow” about WBMP. It’s just that modern ears are used to hearing music from this period on fast-forward, so to speak. Because I changed the Tonality, listeners were no longer comparing this performance to the same piece (in Minor) that they’ve heard dozens of times at frantic tempi. They were listening with ears that were more open to something closer to Chopin’s original tempo intention. When I posted the video, I wasn’t even thinking about the implications on WBMP. I noticed this after the fact. If I posted a performance of Revolutionary in C Minor, somebody, probably many people, would’ve remarked about how I could/should speed it up.
I have listened to the Liszt quote 4 times over but I still fail to understand how this relates to double beat. Tempo is not even mentioned !!! The three ways he played the piece seem to have represented 1) as he thought Bach meant it for organ e.g. with the types of dynamics that an organ of Bach's time could produce etc, 2) adapted for piano with "nuances" that a piano can produce due to its use of touch sensitive keys and pedal effects and 3) a technically demanding improvisation on the piece, perhaps as an encore piece, which he would play if he wished to astonish his audience as the charlatan his critics were in the habit of calling him. It does not imply that he always played in manner number 3 for his audiences, much less that the tempo of the 3 versions was different.
I think the challenge is to get the exact 19th century meaning of words like "charlatan", "classical", "pittoresque", etc. right. I agree that it is no clear indication of an advanced speed, even though I think that no. 3 suggests it since Liszt is doing everything to impress the audience, and speed is a factor in that. In my opinion, the quote is first of all interesting in terms of the awareness of listeners' expectations at the time and that the mainstream market tended to favour "flashy" interpretations of the third kind. If you achieve the 3rd kind of interpretation by adding lots of extra notes, playing faster, expressive facial expressions, a combination of several of these, etc. might be a question of the individual preferences in terms of the different pianists.
@@gyorgybugyinszki5419 That was an interesting perspective! My guess is that you, György, know much more about Hungarian folk music than I do - to me, it lies somewhere between the music of Brahms (Hungarian dances, Zigeunerlieder, that sort of thing), Liszt (f.ex. Hungarian rhapsodies) and the Hungarian / gipsy folk music that they play for tourists in Hungary and that tends to get quite fast at one point to impress the listeners (think cimbalom, getting faster and faster). I sadly do not know enough about Bartók, Kodály, the influence of the Jewish klezmer music or less commercial Hungarian folk music for that matter.
@@gyorgybugyinszki5419 I think what some people miss is that, as you say, tempo is not necessarily the same as velocity of notes. In fact, as you know but perhaps not some others in this thread, the most notes per second in Hungarian urban gypsy music (magyarnóta, "cigányzene") which is what Liszt, Brahms and other composers heard and used, occurs in the slowest tunes (the hallgató-s) during which the tune is played or sung in a slow rubato/parlando style while the cimbalom player lays down a harmonic carpet by playing superspeed arpeggios, tremolos and runs. Essentially the same technique used by Liszt in Un Sospiro and other similar compositions where he treats the piano almost like a cimbalom with a keyboard attached (which in a way, it is :-) . This is in contrast to the normal accompaniment to the Romanian Doina where the tune is also deathly slow and rubato but, in this case, the accompaniment, while also super fast, is in a strict rapid beat. Of course, to wow the audience, the preferred medium for "wowing" the audience is the theme and variations usually on csárdás theme which they take gradually from moderate to frantic tempo with superspeed runs and variations played by alternately by the violinist, the clarinetist and the cimbalom player. I agree with you fully ! Impossible not to hear the influence of these things in many of Liszt's "showy" pieces.
@@claudiabatcke1312 The Hungarian "gypsy" music which inspired Liszt, Brahms, Sarasate, Monti etc. was not folk music. It was composed urban middle class music loosely based on folk forms and played by gypsy bands - popular songs (known as "magyar nóta" (Hungarian Song) written for urban middle class folks but also becoming popular with rural people. Often played now for tourists along with other things of a popular nature which they think will please the crowd (Besame mucho etc ..). Rather like the relationship between "country music" in the USA vs traditional American folk songs. Another stream was known as "Verbunkos" (recruiting) music which heavily influenced Erkel's music. In Hungary, people often did not differentiate between true folk songs of the new style and the composed songs and many folk variants of the composed songs were developed. The origin of the urban gypsy bands was actually classical - originally gypsies were trained to play classical music at the country estates of northern Hungarian mid and lower nobility back at the end of the 18th century which is why they use classical harmonies and modelled their setup on classical groupings (violin, viola, Cello/bass, cimbalom/piano, and optional clarinet). Free flow of musical ideas between the upper and lower classes :-)
@@gabithemagyar Ok, if we skip the discussion whether that music should be called folk music or not: What do you think we can take with us from it which could give us a hint about what Liszt would do to impress the audience?
13:35 It might not be what the composer had in mind, but many a composition could very well be accepted by them in a variety of interpretations and tempi, depending on the situation. It varies from day to day, just like you might go out for a walk today, and for a run tomorrow.. in the same shoes. I'm tempted to think that interpretation today is on such a high level that many compositions have gone through trial and error to become what they are today. The composers of old would have never imagined the popularity of their works. Many of their works are much more than what became of them on the day they were conceived. They were busy going for the next composition. As the composer originally intended is not necessarily always the best, because those works hadn't been put through the paces yet and didn't know everything about their capabilities.
These composers were a big step above the intelligence of the common folk. Smart people have always been outnumbered by stupid people. It's a product of civilization. Without it there would no room for stupideness to reproduce and become the majority. We're pointing this out through musical history
At this point, fast playing should be lumped in with modern art. Modern art shows confusion, brutality, degradation and no emotion. The same with fast playing, really.
Excuse me but my ancient ears have trouble making out one of the words in the item you quoted at around 3:52 into the video :-) Is the word "picaresque" or "picturesque" ?
I think we have to be careful not too take someone's memory of a incident too literal. I agree in the main with what you are saying regarding a different approach or style when playing for the public. However this is not a new phenomenon and find it with recent pianists whether live or recording (an interpretation when young can be different to when they have grown and tastes changed i.e. (Gould). In conclusion again on taking things too literal I believe Liszt would not have played Beethoven op111 as a charlatan, but some other music in public even Bach. I believe he would play different on a small gathering as in a major event.
Dear Wim, I have been following most of your videos by now from the eye of a "modern", "single-beat" musician with a very open mind. And while I think that for sure the tempo executions usually work fantastically on historic keyboard instruments I would be very intrigued to hear you applying them on orchestra, vocal or ballett performances. On historical pianos (or predecessors) it is usually possible to play nearly however slow one wants while still making the music interesting (through means of articulation) - with ensemble works this might get very very tricky. I imagine the endless phrases of Brahms vocal pieces, and even the Beethoven symphonies you already performed in piano reductions performed by real orchestras with players which rely on breath. Have you ever tried something like this and seen whether it is practically possible to gain the same level of musical quality? If you demand universality of the metronome numbers, then surely these must also apply to other dispositions? I would be very interested to hear your thoughts on that...
I am trying to play J. Pachelbel. Werde munter, mein Gemüte (Choralvariationen) Every recording I have listened to are on organ and are too fast for me follow. I understand that the IV variation is written with demi semi quavers that are like trills. If I slow the piece down for my ability am I doing the piece a disservice. I am basically self taught and trills have always been a problem for me. The piece published by Schott metronome is: 104 - 1/4 note. I cannot find this piece recorded on piano other than the choral portion. I am sorry I cannot become a patron I just can not afford to be... I follow each UA-cam recording you out.
Wim...I don't know if your are aware of John Field. John was the originator of the nocturne prior but also at the same time as Chopin. Chopin even supposedly was aware of John Field. The point being....that all pieces of music, no matter how unique, amazing or supposedly original all had a prototype from which they were made. It is our job as admirers of music to not only seek out the originators or prototypes but to also search deeper for the meaning in the music. This is a lifelong quest , so that whomever says that there is no more original or meaningful music anymore may have better insight into the mystery and true magic behind genius and all those that came thereafter .
So, the Trascendental etudes? Were they the effect on Listz of this perverse "extremely fast" way of playing of 19th century? Listz was more or less split in two? As you have told to us, he speaks of this "charlatan" way of playing, but, i think, we can make the same comparison beetween some playings by Horowitz and, for example, some things play by Lang Lang. I wouldn't use that quote in that way. However, bye Wim.
Your interpretation of this quote is a very liberal one, given the little information that is given. If Liszt was playing on an organ, tempo change is only one of the variables he could have changed. Registration, for example, is a huge thing when you play baroque music on a romantic "symphonic" organ. The "charlatan" version may have included ornaments that weren't written (trills, arpeggios), the kind of things that are disgusting to educated listeners but astonish the crowds. In that category, we can include exaggerated gestures. I'm not saying there were no tempo change between the three versions but, once again, this is very vague, and it would have been so much simpler to write "the different versions were getting faster and faster."
Wim, how do you account for the fact that the premiere of Beethoven's 6th and 7th symphonies, alongside his 4th Piano concerto and other pieces, was at a concert that lasted 4 hours? By your theory this should've lasted at least 5, and that's not to account for the fact that there was an interlude in the concert which counted as part of the 4 hours, as well as when you think they would have to prepare the various pieces by bringing on different performers etc.
We were just discussing the concert further up/down, under Christian Engel's commentary. That is the concert from December 22nd, 1808, and it is the premiere of the 5th and 6th symphony, not the 7th. One of the things we f.ex. don't know, is to which degree they played the repetitions - they knew it was going to be a long concert, and it was rather common to skip repetitions at the time. The Choral Fantasy, which was also premiered, was planned to be played without the repetitions, and when Beethoven started to conduct it with, the music broke down, and they had to start over again. If you want to discuss this concert, too, I suggest we do it all in one place, so head over there. :-)
@@Anyideas14 At the moment, it is further down from here, at least in how youtube shows me the comments, it was quite high up when we started to comment. It is the one with 23 replies (at the moment). It is not Christian himself who brought up the concert, just look for the name and open the replies. :-)
What makes you believe I would "lie" Sinan? It is a strong word. And welcome to the world of UA-cam, the other opposite would be a black thumbnail and a question mark as title. Title and thumbnail here might be strong, but are entirely based upon what Liszt said.
@@AuthenticSound I know, in case you didn't notice, I am absolutely astonished by your findings and proofs :D Your titles always seem so impossible and yet you deliver exactly what you describe ^^
Interpretation seems to be very much biased by the lens of culture at the time at which it is performed. The composer, which is also a player, is no doubt influenced in some way by that same "timely" culture and so, a degree of variation in real "intent" I feel will always be present. Most people have a hard time to really express what they feel with words, imagine a composer with music, regardless of his genius. Not an exact science indeed. At the end of the day, unless you have the composer sitting right next to you, instructing you on how he "hears" the piece in his mind, the next best thing is to simply play it to your best "feel" whatever that may be...and next Wednesday you might feel different about it too so...have fun, that's what music is for. Expressing oneself. That is the beauty of interpretation to me.
I think that "charlatan" might not be the best translation into English. A charlatan is an impostor or con man, whereas the context suggests more of a superficial, showy, populist razzmatazz performance. Perhaps a word like extravagant, flamboyant, showy, ostentatious, bombastic, sensationalist, glittery, pretentious, facile, shallow, or flashy?
I think this vid also proves that Chopin knew exactly what he was doing when he composed in op 10 etudes (one of his earliest opus numbers inspired by the “charlatan” playing of liszt)-to be played as fast as humanly possible!! Chopin was an admirer of liszt playing, so I think he wrote those etudes to be played fast, as he did dedicate them to Liszt! And if Chopin was an admirer of liszt don’t you think he would attempt to play like Liszt? Meaning none of his music would be played at whole beat? His scherzos, his ballades, his nocturnes, his etudes, his sonatas in today’s speed are all as I believe Chopin would have wanted as Chopin, once again was inspired by Liszt! To your theory tho it makes Chopin a charlatan too!
No! Most of the studies (op 10) were completed before Chopin came to Paris in 1831. -- Chopin is the CREATOR of modern piano technique: in his studies he devised new tools that allowed the next generation of pianists to play much quicker! Cortot talks about it here: ua-cam.com/video/maOywGBgzhA/v-deo.html
James Elliott sources quote Chopin saying this in a letter: “I hardly even know what my pen is scribbling, since at the moment Liszt is playing one of my etudes and distracting my attention from my respectable thoughts. I would love myself to acquire from him the manner in which he plays my [etudes].”
hubert drefus yes even if Chopin didn’t play them at today’s speed-I highly doubt it is wbpm speed-it does not mean he didn’t hear them in his head at that speed (which Wim mention all the time about Beethoven). What the composer wants is to hear what he heard in his head when thinking about the piece, and since these were dedicated to liszt I think it’s same to assume he heard liszt playing in his head when writing! And many book of op 10 say dedicated to F. Liszt, so I don’t know what your saying “No!” to.
@@AuthenticSound How? I cannot find the original French only a translation '-“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'. - "nuances" is the key word. Presumably "picturesque movement" was 'mouvement pittoresque', which is a phrase I have seen used in the context of architecture - not at all related to tempo.
1)So composers in the 19th century wrote their MM according to what they played as the audience would love (as a sarltan) or as the what the composer wants to hear? 2)you are saying that liszt was teaching his students according to what the audience wants to hear so did liszt preform and write his MM according what he has in mind or what the audience wants to hear? 3)Did they write those slow MM and played their pieces as they originally wanted it to be played and then comes another pianist play the same piece faster as the audience want to hear and then the audience love this playing more than what the original composers played their pieces? (Probably the same meaning of no 2 😅) 4)you said that changing tempo is changing every think so why when people comments that your playing is slow you say ((faster faster faster technic technic technic)) as if tempo and technic are not important in the performance?
I talked about 4 points and you stick with one word I said and you consider it wrong. Okay sorry I mean those tempos according to the theory you believe, now your turn.
Composer: I must express myself.
Player: I must enjoy myself.
Charlatan: I must survive.
With democratization comes competition. And at world scale, with so many people, competition is crowned king :p.
Yeah Liszt was admittedly something of a show-off in his early career. Chopin said so, Mendelssohn said so , Clara Schumann said so, and so did his own former teacher Carl Czerny. But at least he was a good show off, and had something to back it up with. Given his later contributions to music through his patronage and compositions, I think he has earned our forgiveness.👏
I know I say this quite often but maybe not even often enough. Thank you so much when for the work you do. It is beyond measure and price. So appreciated.
Wim" not when
Great and convincing video, Wim.
Maybe it´s a good idea to get in touch with the guys from the Liszt House in Weimar. If anyone knows what Liszt taught his students then it´s them. They have also tons of original documents.
I found an interview of Moritz Rosenthal (a pupil of Liszt) where he said that when he played the Paraphrase (?) of Don Giovanni before Liszt, Liszt was impressed by his speed. Rosenthal then sait that if he played it the same way today (so back in 1920 or something), the public would kind of moke him.
I put the link of the article here : etudemagazine.com/etude/1924/04/moritz-rosenthal---if-franz-liszt-should-come-back-again.html
"Take, for instance, Liszt’s own Don Juan Fantasie, considered by some to be among the most difficult compositions ever written for the piano. In the Champagne Song it was the custom to play much slower than the air is sung upon the stage. When I was twenty-two years old I played this for Liszt and he marveled at my speed. If I should play it to-day at the same speed as I played it then, people would think me to be very cautious-perhaps losing my powers" This is the exact quote. It's very interesting indeed. And I'm not a "believer" of the whole-beat theory (*but* I still have significant doubts because there are many things that doesn't make sense in double-beat or "modern" way of using the metronome.
Tempi have been slowing down basically since the mid 1800s. Because playing slowly apparently shows how deep and profound we are - all very noble and admirable to be sure, but...also a little boring, unfortunately.
I agree it is an important quote thank you. However based on the enormous integrity of Liszt all three performances were I am sure dazzling. Each with a timeless quality. His performance for the audience was a marriage or consummation of a unique character. Liszt became the audience and together flew to new heights. All concerts of today are just distant echos. Liszts live concerts were enhanced also by virtue of it not being recorded. It was truly once in a lifetime experience. After a Liszt or Paganini concert you were destroy.
The painter J.A.D. Ingres(very great) who was also a passionate fiddler went to a Paganini concert…stamped his feet and shouted “Traitre” and stomped out…. This is all presumably after Ingres’s fabulous portrait drawing of said fiddler….😅
your channel gave me back the joy of piano playing. so simple!
I for one have to say that these types of quotes and the whole beat research that yourself and Lorenz have done, has significantly improved my love of music. Not just Bach and Beethoven and Mozart whom I loved already, but also regarding Liszt and Chopin.
I was a bit of a Glenn Gould type in not caring for either of them much thinking that their music was purely just technicality on show for its own amusement. But the more that your channel has removed that aspect of speed and pure virtuosity I can now appreciate Liszt and Chopin's compositions as actual music. Both well informed music and that which continues from the previous eras.
And I want to thank you a lot for doing that.
thank you for being here
I think that Liszt was most at home in style #2. I think that it wasn't so much faster, as more romantic and expressive. This was accomplished by varying the tempo with rubato, varying the tone with dynamics, and bringing out the melodies by playing them more strongly than the other notes, all to express the emotions of the music. He was prone to elaborating, adding extra notes as a flourish or variation.
Bless you Wim. Your arguments are very logical.
"Setting aside your own ego" is such a great way to look at what we ought to do at the piano. Lately it is almost like meditation, leaving my "self" and embodying something from the composer's mind. Not sure how to explain it properly.
I once had a conversation with Valentina where I asked her whether I should pursue music and my hopes for that career (I chose not to, music is a hobby for me and I enjoy it this way much more) and she gave me a very enlightening response: you should only pursue music if you value it as a social experience and by that I don't even mean playing in particular, I mean pretty much any way of sharing music with others, even by simply talking about it.
Music is always meant as an expression, meaning it must reach someone, it cannot live without a listener. Beethoven himself encourages this idea with the quote that music should strike fire in the hearts of men and bring tears to the eyes of women. So it is safe to say, composers cannot simply compose for themselves disregarding everything else.
That being said, we live in fundamentally different times than Liszt and Beethoven. Today, pretty much everyone can (and should) share their art via the internet and with a bit of effort build a large fanbase. These fanbases are individual and that is the main difference. In Liszt and Beethoven's times there was only one grand audience with similar standards. If they demanded speed, then they would get speed. Musicians, not having today's luxury had to bow or be cursed to obscurity or worse (Rachmaninoff was driven to insanity despite it not being his fault). Even today, this principle applies. Do not underestimate how much followers the likes of Lisitsa would lose if they suddenly started playing their music much slower.
On the other hand, she is very often criticized for playing too fast, even by people not aware of this theory. In the end, there can be as many interpretations as there can be audiences. Historical and correct cannot be confused in this context
Your description of the lunch is why I revere Liszt as one of the greatest musicians - he could do it all. That is where very few top pianists of our times can follow, they are mostly reproduction machines.
VERY excited for this. As a liszt fanatic I think we would be very disappointed/confused if we heard him play today. I imagine similar to Ervin Nyiregyházi
Oh Ervin and Liszt...wow.
I just want to say that I went to sleep the other night listening to your duo piano of Beethovens 5th symphony, and woke up during the finale of the last movement bewildered and terrified from what I was hearing. Very powerful.
@@mediolanumhibernicus3353 Being that I went to sleep about an hour before dawn that night, you might be correct!
be sure to set the settings to 2x speed before the stream starts
And don't forget to enjoy since in real life, where you really would need that function you do not have it 🥴🥴🥴
@@AuthenticSound thats why I teach and dont perform in the carnegie hall ;-)
even the Carnegie gods need that youtube speed button to make your claim come through. If you would really have looked into the fascinating world of authentic MMs you'd know they would need it even... desperately
only a sith deals in absolutes
@@piano8556 Isn't that an absolute statement in itself?
"Pittoresque" may not necessarily mean "faster" but one thing I have seen throughout my life (50 years now), and that is: people (meaning the audience), ALWAYS equate faster to "better" or "masterful". Whereas slow is somehow related to "less impressive" or to "study velocity" to put it that way. Also, It's my recurrent observation that people tend to elaborate stereotypes around vague words such as "feeling" associating it with slow passages where the musician goes as hyper-gestural as Jim Carrey. In people minds', if you play faster, you are advanced. That I have seen, and it makes perfect sense to me with the idea that that is what the musicians back in the XIX century would have thought as well. I can't imagine those young performers saying "Oh, we must be advanced, and look as such, let's play slower". Oh, c'mon!
You're a guitar player? Then you know that somehow the guitar community is much wiser than the classical audience. Fast guitar playing is seen as nice optional but not necessity. Just look at John Mayer - mega successful blues player and singer and no virtuoso in the classical sense.
@@Theosis78 Maybe I did not make my point clear: I agree with you 100%.
@@javiermejia1723 The classical community can learn this from us. 👍
Just for myself... I think i'm between category I and II. For me it is important to know what the composer wishes, but as music is also a way of expressing yourself, I think that adding personal touches is not only unavoidable, but also an important aspect of being a musician. That's also what Liszt did: in option 2, he played it with his own opinion, alongside the composers wishes.
This bit about the adjustment of tempo to the modern instrument is super interesting. It reminds me of conversations I’ve had with a teacher of mine about tempi in the Bach Suites. It’s true that the baroque cello’s low strings “ring” longer, making pedal effects such as the Suite 5 prelude more convincing. He advocated for a quicker tempo to compensate for this, and I find the quicker Suite 5 more convincing than the prevailing performing tradition of playing it very slow.
Did the piano follow a similar trend where the modern instruments just don’t have as much natural ring? That could be a reason why Liszt perhaps played certain Bach things faster.
Overall moral of the story though: performing traditions have their pitfalls.
Thank you, I have been wrestling this question "What tempo shall I take for this situation?" - and it is a serious and exhausting one for a professional pianist and organist, and I never talked it out with anyone. I enjoyed working with every director who gave me the opportunity to play music with them. However, concerning performance skills, think of this: the acoustics in the room...especially in an acoustically delayed situation such as pipe organs, - playing before the beat - before the sound is heard - one must be sure where the beat lands just for starters, and that it is the director's beat, not one's own. The audiences expectations always helps one play on the side of exuberance. Now in my dotage, I thrill at the Adagios and lyric solos, no longer needing an audience to please. I play what I want at the speed I want. My resolution to the problem of tempo is to play at the speed for the problem to be solved. I love the movement of chords, and I will go slower to savor the moment with that chord. And yes, my faster tempos are slower now, and even more enjoyable.
This fits nicely with an interesting book called Noise: A Political Economy of Music, by Jacques Attali (1977), which seeks to show how classical music was shaped by commercialism as composers and performers continually raised standards of difficulty in order to widen the chasm between professional musicians and the audiences which supported their efforts.
This would mach with the family testimonial that a viewer kindly left in the comments a few days ago: His students trying to play as they heard him play on stage, and Liszt trying to slow them down...
I bet some students were left with the idea that he was trying to repress future competition...
That’s a cool find Wim. I think maybe that Czerny’s Bach edition fall into the 2nd category, using more modern fingering and articulation, i.e. legato, but still in the spirit of how Bach was originally played, maybe even the tempi are close to the original. In the preface to the WTC he mentions that Allegro was slower in Baroque times, so he was at least aware of how Baroque music was played.
I have read in Turk, CPE Bach, and a quote about Mozart, that music was played in a more non-legato way, I think the word choppy is used about Mozart’s playing. There are other quotes but I can’t remember them. With the slower tempi in Bach you are allowed more articulation choices especially in 16ths, you can even use slur patterns based on what is seen in his string works.
Like you have said, if Czerny came back and gave us a lecture on Baroque performance practice, all the biggest names in music would be there, conductors and performers. So why ignore his tempi and fingerings from his Bach editions, it makes no sense to me. He gave m.m. for all of the Bach works in his editions, why would they not be accurate? Also, he states that his fingering, articulation, & tempi are in the spirit of how Beethoven played these works, I think Beethoven knew a thing or two about playing Bach, and he lived even closer to the Baroque tradition.
Wonderful, insightful, brilliant. One comment i recall that my mother's teacher (Josè vianna de Motta) had said to her was that Liszt could be all things at the piano.
Beautiful observation
On the matter of tempo, some musicians in this present era are still guilty of playing faster than the composer intended - simply because they can, and they wish to demonstrate this to an admiring audience. I am constantly hearing examples of this act of artistic vandalism! I recently heard a new recording of a Mozart piano concerto strummed thought at break-neck speed where all the subtlety and beauty was lost and trampled upon by the performer's efforts to demonstrate their superiority of dexterity and sheer virtuosity. Perhaps with some composers this may add some extra interest to a pedestrian composition, but there are countless examples I have heard where this is an act of pure destruction! Thank you for your interesting research into this problem - which I fear will always be with us, owing to a serious deficiency in human musical preferences..
*sees thumbnail*
Liszt was living in a society, we all live in a society
Did Liszt knew that we live in a society ?
@@classicgameplay10 Even Bach had his "we live in a society" moments. All the big composers did. We should've listened. F.
@@classicgameplay10
Oh please. We all know. Even those that seek to reject it.
Your work and this channel bring so much joy to my life. Thank you!
Wonderful video, and the insights of Liszt are as true today as they were apparently in his time. It is likely therefore that the composers knew this as well, and were not surprised that their music might very well be performed in the manner of option 2 or 3. I love that you are preserving and demonstrating what option 1 was, as without it the other options would lack context. This is one of the most important videos you've made on tempo reconstruction to me because it addresses all 3 critical aspects about how a composition travels from the composer to the performer and to the audience. Thank you for this marvelous video and the work you do to educate us.
Makes me wonder if composers of that time were shrewd enough to write down excessively slow tempos knowing that their music would be played faster than what was indicated, as was the custom.
Bravo Vim! I couldn't have said it better!
Really enjoyed this video - love your passion about the musical ideal!
An excellent 'essay' - thank you ;)
I noticed 50 years ago that Claudio Arrau played Beethoven a little slowrer than the other great concert artists. I knew what I heard was the absolute perfection of Beethoven.
Let me add that the virus of faster and more flexible is also getting in the classic ballet. Just saying.
isn't this exactly the same complaint glenn gould had about audiences in the 1950s and 60s?
Basically. He became tired of touring anyway.
Yes yes!!! Glenn understood this much in the same way Wim does
glenn was a visionary.
Being composer myself I was shocked when I were at Royal Academy that musicians of today are only parrots. Musicians of the past were much more creative and skilled. They understood music on a deeper level. Less ortodox more inovative. I feel like it starts to come back a little but still far away. I think musicians in 18 and 19 century were something like jazz musicians, improvising and never play the same way. They were searching after the groove and feeling in music. They could play extremely fast, even faster than today but as a contrast the slow part could be extremely slow too. They were just more artistic than most musicians today
Glen experimented like crazy. Ever hear his super slow Turkish March? I don’t think he cared about what Mozart intended when he did that recording 😂
The late 19th century and early 20th century were a time of pianists who played increasingly loud and fast, and who also each played with a distinct style, like modern jazz, rock and pop performers. People wanted to hear the famous pianist's interpretation, not the composer's original idea. At the same time, to play louder, they raised their stools ever higher, so they could pound the keys harder. The late 20th century was all about getting rid of that and going back to the composer's original intent (although usually with style #2, which is more interesting).
This is a very good and interesting explanation. Thank you!
Interesting stuff. I'll listen to some of your performances.
oh i did not know about Frederic Lamond...until this video ! my Lamon Scottish kin !
His recordings are very nice, even though they are fast. Listen to his performance of Libestraum No. 3
One must humbly ask what is the word “charlatan”. Keep in mind being well read was a source of dignity unlike today. Letting Liszt’s score speak to us there is perhaps not a measure of music that was not an effect to surprise and mislead the ear to the unexpected. Indeed a high art and true art of a “charlatan”. Liszt as you are aware loved gypsy musicians who actually mimicked virtuosity with no real skill. Liszt made this into an art. Never was there an insincere bone in Liszt body. Liszt considered the word charlatan a compliment. It’s a different word today. Today words are more ridged due to illiteracy.
As i have said before, disregard your detractors. You are absolutely correct. Your work will live in history.
It did blew me out of the chair! - even though you have already given us so many many important evidences, which supported your search for authentic reconstruction of those composers' real intentions - but this one... this is something else again, because now you have brought the ultimate evidence: the admitting of the truth as given by a composer of that time. who was also a virtuoso-player himself. This is a shocking evidence and a shocking testimony by one of the greatest virtuosi of all times! In addition, no one can say now: "oh, the composer could not perform his own compositions because he is not good enough as a player and there are players that could deliver his intentions better than him"! In older times, the composer and the performer were both in one man, and sometimes (like in Bach's case) they were also tuners and even instrument's builders. There was a process during the years, of separating it to 2 different professions, and at the same time, began a process of concert-halls big enough for the public (opening this kind of music to the middle-class, whereas before it was meant for the aristocrats only). A kind of "Bread and circuses"... That is the beginning-point of the growing need to meet the demands of the masses, hence - virtuosity. But "in vino veritas", as they say - after a good meal he confessed... And when these demands conflicted with his artistic values, he could not tolerate it anymore and he left the stage. You were right to divide the problem (and its solutions) to 3 comprehensive parts/stages. It made the whole situation very clear. Thanks for this (again) unique and so important upload.
I feel like that was a nice thing for Liszt to say openly. He could've just slammed the table and left
Liszt has always been my absolutely favorite composer, and he always will be the greatest for me. His music is so much deeper than it is usually represented. It is very sad that his masterpieces are often used to show off or as a horse races exercises. I understand that a lot of his pieces were meant to be played in a fast tempo and for me it goes without saying. However I suppose that speed and technique should serve the piece, but not vice versa. Because pianist's technique is a tool that allows him/her to fulfill the intention of the composer and at the same time to interpret a piece in his/her own way, to find a harmony between being an interpreter of composers views and being an artist himself/herself. Technique should serve a purpose of the proper interpretation of the piece, but unfortunately, these days his masterpieces often used simply as an opportunity to show a technique, without paying proper attention to melody, colours of harmony and a story written by means of a sound.
I'd love to find out that the Liszt playing that led me to not like most of his music was a distortion of music I'd like if it were played at a different tempo he wanted.
The lay crowd has no clue that it is actually very difficult to play at a slow tempo and keep it steady. Let's be honest, 90% of people at concerts have no clue what constitutes good. They read what critics say and they go with that. People never gave a passing thought to the paintings of Van Gogh, until experts told them they are good. Now people go to museums to admire them, not because they themselves reached the conclusion that those paintings are good, but just because it is common knowledge that Van Gogh was a master. Fast playing is a no brainer. It impresses and astonishes.
Wim, this is important in two ways: 1) What is the science in art (and vis versa), and 2) What is the spiritual connection as oppose to the lower emotions conveyed in an interrupted piece, because there is a difference in quality? As Socrates says in the Republic that the music that you listen to is the person that you'll become! Therefore, if music can make a person human, how is that music played?
Bryan Barajas Music was considered a science until the late 18th century. I beg to differ, it very much still is a science as it is an art.
@@davidgonzalez-herrera2980 I do agree, which is why our Constitution says that the Congress Promote the Useful Sciences and Arts, which are not separate!
@@davidgonzalez-herrera2980 I recommend reading Lyndon LaRouche on "Think Like Beethoven!"
www.bookdepository.com/Think-Like-Beethoven-Lyndon-H-Larouche-Jr/9781655185649
Interessante approfondimento Lisztiziano direi il Paganini del pianoforte .Unico come Chopin.Grazie
Very insightful and interesting
in what category does improvising over a song's chord progression or melody fall? And i'm not talking about playing fast, i just mean inventing based on some specific piece/song theme, wich could really be slow or fast or whatever..thanks
Wonderful.
Imagine if Liszt had a DAW?
Yes. 👍🏻👍🏻
I am interested in this notion that many performers in the 19th century may have been compelled to "choose option 3" and that this would lead in some cases to counter-reactions--for instance, it may have played a significant part in Liszt choosing to leave the concert stage partway through his own long (19th century) life. What about the pressure on slightly younger composers, the ones who like Liszt were also excellent performers? Brahms is foremost in my mind: as a young pianist he presumably knew the option "to astonish the audience is your primary goal" and however much he acceded to this pressure, or maybe conversely fought against it--what about when he COMPOSED? Did Brahms want to ward off artists who would warp and alter the intentions of his own music via "astonishing" performances, and if so, HOW did Brahms adopt alternate compositional strategies and methods to forestall or at least limit this from happening?
We have built an incredible aura around big-name composers; if, by some miracle, had the chance to listen to Beethoven himself, we may not be very impressed. We have so many options to choose from today and we are spoiled. Many approaches to musical interpreting. Are composers really good interpreters? Pianists recreate those works. Composer’s intents are just ink on paper without the interpreter. If the composer were alive, he may even alter his own score after further consideration.
As a translator, I always repurpose a text depending on the audience. The source text or the score don’t represent PERFECTION all the time. They may be improved upon. They may need more to come to life. So, in that respect, I agree with Liszt’s take. The audience is not always musically educated to discern what we think is the “authentic version”. I personally do not care for the authentic version as long as it musically makes sense. However, I get pissed off when a composers’ intents are disregarded and it leads to the work losing its organic integrity -and it just sounds BAD. I object to playing too fast when the melodic lines are blurred.
Liszt, despite the fame he enjoyed, decried the situation of musician-artists in society; he hated the “amuser” role bestowed upon them by society’s prejudices. There is no denying he played to please the audience, but let us not lose perspective. He did so also to democratize ART for the masses. He enchanted people. He soon realized that it doesn’t contribute to defending the TRUE ROLE of artists in society and that is to “enlighten”, educate and elevate the public.
All that really matters in piano performance is what the audience is willing to pay for. If the non-musicians in the audience cared so much about the composer's original intent, why would they buy tickets to see Mozart performed by anyone other than Wolfgang Amadeus himself?
There's a similar phenomenon today with modern music when it comes to controversial lyrics and lyrics being open to interpretation. We see music getting banned in the USA and songwriters getting blacklisted because they weren't 100% exactly clear about their intent. Kinda ridiculous if you ask me! Intent is useful information, but like you said it's about balancing that with audience appeal.
This is why Chopin didn't like to concertize. This seems to be why he died penniless as well.
Here is an excerpt from Chopin's biography by Allan Walker:
"Chopin’s reputation as a concert pianist presents us with a paradox. It rested on fewer than twenty public concerts across his lifetime, in which with one or two exceptions he played only his own music. In earlier years he performed before large audiences in Warsaw, Vienna, Munich, and Paris; later on he played in Edinburgh, Manchester, and Glasgow. He faced his largest audience in Manchester during the closing months of his life, where twelve hundred people heard him play. Yet he was a reluctant virtuoso. He once admitted to Liszt, “I am not fitted to give concerts, the public frightens me; I feel suffocated by its panting breath, paralyzed by its curious glance, mute before those unknown faces.”11
His sound was small and it often failed to carry in large halls. It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that this was the result of his weakened physical condition. Chopin despised the hard-hitting virtuosi of his time, and often likened their forced, rough sounds to those of a dog’s mindless barking. His natural inclination was for infinite gradations of sound, and myriad colors."
@@mehdiadlany Smart people have always been outnumbered by stupid people. It's a product of civilization. Without it there would no room for stupideness to reproduce and become the majority.
"Charlatans today neither improvise nor encourage movement from their audiences [...] 'notes inégales' outside of a baroque or pop context are considered vulgar"
You think that there were no musicians of the 19th century who didn’t pander to the audience?? How about Chopin, who rarely played concerts? You think he had to speed up his pieces to amaze the audience? No way, he played his pieces as written, and he even was extremely rude to Liszt after Liszt performed one of his Nocturnes with a lot of added embellishments to wow the audience (as Liszt liked to do). Chopin said something like, play what’s written or don’t play at all.
I understand that you want expression and meaning in the music rather than flare and speed, but the problem is - why would I pay to see a performance that anyone can do, people want to see something truly impressive AND something that most people cannot perform. There something about experiencing something that is almost unattainable by the average person that is truly amazing to see. Although I do agree that there should also be the essence of the original intent. Hard to work out how to do that, it’s kind of one or the other.
"a performance that anyone can do" -- you make it sound like speed is the only thing that sets a great pianist apart from the amateur. I can play many Bach fugues. Often I can play them as fast as Glenn Gould does. But can I play them as Gould does? Very far from it.
Xī sāi luó What do you think is more likely. To refine a piece that you can already play and perfect it to your own expressive liking OR to play a piece that requires insanely difficult technique that requires years and years of practicing in order to be able to play it 100% accurately.
That doesn't make sense. What professional musicians play won't be played by most people in the audience, musically educated members in an audience, a niche minority, will agonize about the minute details of a performance anyway, one can't please everyone on that niche audience.
Tzctplus Of course it will probably never be played by most people in the audience, I am merely talking about a sense of attainablity
Maybe this was done on purpose by the Jesuits(or they were somehow involved)?Through their education system? I've heard barenboim say something about "order from chaos" which is Jesuit/Catholic social teaching(not saying he's involved just that he may have learned that phrase because it's one of those things that is repeated alot so other people start saying it (like how "common good" is often repeated and used as a trojan horse to take people's rights). It makes sense seeing all the problems it (double tempo)has caused.. and the fact that it turns beautiful music into an enervating frenzy of notes.(or it could have easily happened because masses listened to charlatan performances from musicians that knew but didn't care.)
I think we are very fortunate to have the opportunity to listen to this music..btw "1844" was also an important date in prophetic history...but yeah thank you wim and everyone else involved!
Geencie Castillo This is an intriguing insight
@@davidgonzalez-herrera2980 cool lol idk I just thought since the Jesuits(with the help of the evil angels) pretty much run everything why wouldn't they do something to destroy classical music..given the fact that alot of it was made for praising God, getting people to play it fast for self-exaltation would be a way of desecrating the music.
@@davidgonzalez-herrera2980 ua-cam.com/video/2k2T1WVZsyg/v-deo.html here's a video that explains more about how the Jesuits run the world with quotes that are "straight from the horses mouth" as some might say.
@@davidgonzalez-herrera2980 if you think about it if you were a Jesuit it would be easy to get all the important prominent people to begin teaching the wrong way and soon everyone would do it that way and people would think the old way is ridiculous and make up all types of arguments to defend it because it's embarrassing to admit that they were decieved and not in the right..
kindof like how the majority of Bible believers keep Sunday holy even though it basically goes against what the bible says, and the few that still keep the Sabbath on the 7th day of the week are seen as legalistic and restrictive.. and thus the sabbath is desecrated and the day of the sun is exalted thus linking it to baal(sun/nature) worship and thus they take nature's creator out of the picture.
But yeah just some food for thought.. sorry bout the long paragraph it's just that if I were other people I'd want to be aware of what's really going on. Even though it might not be exactly the case for wbpm it's not unlikely..
The content from this video marks a significant departure from the tone if not substance of much of Wim's previous discussion on tempo. The ideas presented in this video - that tempos and speeds have changed over time, that performers change speeds and approaches depending on environments (different audience 'types', or different acoustic environments), that there is a 'sportive element' in music performance (see: Dmitri Mitropoulos, via Lenny Bernstein) - are not new ideas, or at this point terribly controversial ones. The decisions that a performer makes with regard to these topics are a fundamental part of what makes up their artistry - for better or (sometimes) for worse.
Most (all?) of the previous presentations on this channel on speed/tempo have presented the topic purely in terms of metronome speeds, and in a way which gives us only a completely binary choice: Whole Beat or Double Beat, with no consideration of anything in-between. This is a significant limitation of this approach. We're left with a choice of speeds either very fast (even unplayably fast) or very slow (many would say, too slow).
Just as Goldilocks (of the fairy tale) wasn't satisfied with her first two choices (too hot or too cold, too much or too little), being restricted to only these two extreme choices when it comes to tempo can be similarly unsatisfying.
Perhaps we need to consider that the metronome is a guide, but not the sole or ultimate determinant of performance practice. This approach would be much more in keeping with the message from Liszt's comments that are discussed in this video.
Well, you just proved your critics' point. Playing as fast as possible is historically correct performance practice. Playing whole beat is a scholarly pursuit and as early as 1821 was being relegated to the dust bin. And by 1844, was completely tossed. People pay to hear pyrotechnics. Liszt resented it but clearly he understood what was required of him. And he was wealthy enough to step away from it. Modern concert artists don't have that luxury. This isn't a criticism, it's a fact.
Well said.
Just look at how Lang Lang differs from his CD recordings to live concerts, and compare to those of Marc Andre Hamelin. MAH is clearly the better pianist, but arguably not as financially successful as the show-offs.
Lol
Yes, I guess you could call it a historically correct tempo. But Wim understands that phrase a little differently, as he explains in this video. What did the COMPOSER have in mind before writing their piece down on a sheet of paper?
I think we should be open for the idea that there was more than one kind of audience. It is something that you can understand in the context of the video where Liszt plays for a circle of friends and aquaintances who are open for different options and who like different versions. We know about Chopin that he prefered playing in the salon to giving concerts in big halls. You can see differences also in today's audiences where some artists are filling the big halls and do a lot of crowd-pleasing stuff while other follow more their own instincts, play the music they like in their own way, no matter if they get rich / famous or not. Some also combine the concert life with f.ex. teaching. Not everybody is a Valentina Lisitsa or an André Rieu. :-)
With this addition: it was NOT what the composer's wanted. And that is exactly what we want to reconstruct here, not the Carnegy hall performances of back then.
Do you think Glenn Gould played "too fast" sometimes and "too slow" other times just to mess with people and provide fresh interpretations?
Wim, did you see this video: ua-cam.com/video/jaHI0-nE4O0/v-deo.html Even world renowned organists as Xaver Varnus believe your research :)
Last month I posted this performance of the Revolutionary Etude, but in C Major. ua-cam.com/video/Tk3SDubpFsE/v-deo.html
Here’s what’s interesting to me: this performance is about 25% slower than modern conventional performances, which are in turn about 25% slower than the single beat interpretation of the metronome mark. I played it more slowly because I needed more time to think about where to put my fingers, because most of my time learning the piece was in C Minor. As a result, this performance is pretty close to the WBMP interpretation. Maybe 15% faster.
Of all the people who commented about the video (on UA-cam as well as other platforms), not a single person remarked about the tempo being slow. Dozens of people commented about the novel sound, no one commented on tempo at all.
I take this as evidence that there’s nothing “slow” about WBMP. It’s just that modern ears are used to hearing music from this period on fast-forward, so to speak. Because I changed the Tonality, listeners were no longer comparing this performance to the same piece (in Minor) that they’ve heard dozens of times at frantic tempi. They were listening with ears that were more open to something closer to Chopin’s original tempo intention.
When I posted the video, I wasn’t even thinking about the implications on WBMP. I noticed this after the fact. If I posted a performance of Revolutionary in C Minor, somebody, probably many people, would’ve remarked about how I could/should speed it up.
thanks for sharing
I have listened to the Liszt quote 4 times over but I still fail to understand how this relates to double beat. Tempo is not even mentioned !!! The three ways he played the piece seem to have represented 1) as he thought Bach meant it for organ e.g. with the types of dynamics that an organ of Bach's time could produce etc, 2) adapted for piano with "nuances" that a piano can produce due to its use of touch sensitive keys and pedal effects and 3) a technically demanding improvisation on the piece, perhaps as an encore piece, which he would play if he wished to astonish his audience as the charlatan his critics were in the habit of calling him. It does not imply that he always played in manner number 3 for his audiences, much less that the tempo of the 3 versions was different.
I think the challenge is to get the exact 19th century meaning of words like "charlatan", "classical", "pittoresque", etc. right. I agree that it is no clear indication of an advanced speed, even though I think that no. 3 suggests it since Liszt is doing everything to impress the audience, and speed is a factor in that. In my opinion, the quote is first of all interesting in terms of the awareness of listeners' expectations at the time and that the mainstream market tended to favour "flashy" interpretations of the third kind. If you achieve the 3rd kind of interpretation by adding lots of extra notes, playing faster, expressive facial expressions, a combination of several of these, etc. might be a question of the individual preferences in terms of the different pianists.
@@gyorgybugyinszki5419 That was an interesting perspective!
My guess is that you, György, know much more about Hungarian folk music than I do - to me, it lies somewhere between the music of Brahms (Hungarian dances, Zigeunerlieder, that sort of thing), Liszt (f.ex. Hungarian rhapsodies) and the Hungarian / gipsy folk music that they play for tourists in Hungary and that tends to get quite fast at one point to impress the listeners (think cimbalom, getting faster and faster). I sadly do not know enough about Bartók, Kodály, the influence of the Jewish klezmer music or less commercial Hungarian folk music for that matter.
@@gyorgybugyinszki5419 I think what some people miss is that, as you say, tempo is not necessarily the same as velocity of notes. In fact, as you know but perhaps not some others in this thread, the most notes per second in Hungarian urban gypsy music (magyarnóta, "cigányzene") which is what Liszt, Brahms and other composers heard and used, occurs in the slowest tunes (the hallgató-s) during which the tune is played or sung in a slow rubato/parlando style while the cimbalom player lays down a harmonic carpet by playing superspeed arpeggios, tremolos and runs. Essentially the same technique used by Liszt in Un Sospiro and other similar compositions where he treats the piano almost like a cimbalom with a keyboard attached (which in a way, it is :-) . This is in contrast to the normal accompaniment to the Romanian Doina where the tune is also deathly slow and rubato but, in this case, the accompaniment, while also super fast, is in a strict rapid beat. Of course, to wow the audience, the preferred medium for "wowing" the audience is the theme and variations usually on csárdás theme which they take gradually from moderate to frantic tempo with superspeed runs and variations played by alternately by the violinist, the clarinetist and the cimbalom player. I agree with you fully ! Impossible not to hear the influence of these things in many of Liszt's "showy" pieces.
@@claudiabatcke1312 The Hungarian "gypsy" music which inspired Liszt, Brahms, Sarasate, Monti etc. was not folk music. It was composed urban middle class music loosely based on folk forms and played by gypsy bands - popular songs (known as "magyar nóta" (Hungarian Song) written for urban middle class folks but also becoming popular with rural people. Often played now for tourists along with other things of a popular nature which they think will please the crowd (Besame mucho etc ..). Rather like the relationship between "country music" in the USA vs traditional American folk songs. Another stream was known as "Verbunkos" (recruiting) music which heavily influenced Erkel's music. In Hungary, people often did not differentiate between true folk songs of the new style and the composed songs and many folk variants of the composed songs were developed. The origin of the urban gypsy bands was actually classical - originally gypsies were trained to play classical music at the country estates of northern Hungarian mid and lower nobility back at the end of the 18th century which is why they use classical harmonies and modelled their setup on classical groupings (violin, viola, Cello/bass, cimbalom/piano, and optional clarinet). Free flow of musical ideas between the upper and lower classes :-)
@@gabithemagyar Ok, if we skip the discussion whether that music should be called folk music or not: What do you think we can take with us from it which could give us a hint about what Liszt would do to impress the audience?
interesting video
13:35 It might not be what the composer had in mind, but many a composition could very well be accepted by them in a variety of interpretations and tempi, depending on the situation. It varies from day to day, just like you might go out for a walk today, and for a run tomorrow.. in the same shoes. I'm tempted to think that interpretation today is on such a high level that many compositions have gone through trial and error to become what they are today. The composers of old would have never imagined the popularity of their works. Many of their works are much more than what became of them on the day they were conceived. They were busy going for the next composition. As the composer originally intended is not necessarily always the best, because those works hadn't been put through the paces yet and didn't know everything about their capabilities.
These composers were a big step above the intelligence of the common folk. Smart people have always been outnumbered by stupid people. It's a product of civilization. Without it there would no room for stupideness to reproduce and become the majority. We're pointing this out through musical history
At this point, fast playing should be lumped in with modern art. Modern art shows confusion, brutality, degradation and no emotion. The same with fast playing, really.
Excuse me but my ancient ears have trouble making out one of the words in the item you quoted at around 3:52 into the video :-) Is the word "picaresque" or "picturesque" ?
Hello, I'm GATIS KANDIS!
I think we have to be careful not too take someone's memory of a incident too literal. I agree in the main with what you are saying regarding a different approach or style when playing for the public. However this is not a new phenomenon and find it with recent pianists whether live or recording (an interpretation when young can be different to when they have grown and tastes changed i.e. (Gould). In conclusion again on taking things too literal I believe Liszt would not have played Beethoven op111 as a charlatan, but some other music in public even Bach. I believe he would play different on a small gathering as in a major event.
Dear Wim, I have been following most of your videos by now from the eye of a "modern", "single-beat" musician with a very open mind. And while I think that for sure the tempo executions usually work fantastically on historic keyboard instruments I would be very intrigued to hear you applying them on orchestra, vocal or ballett performances. On historical pianos (or predecessors) it is usually possible to play nearly however slow one wants while still making the music interesting (through means of articulation) - with ensemble works this might get very very tricky. I imagine the endless phrases of Brahms vocal pieces, and even the Beethoven symphonies you already performed in piano reductions performed by real orchestras with players which rely on breath. Have you ever tried something like this and seen whether it is practically possible to gain the same level of musical quality? If you demand universality of the metronome numbers, then surely these must also apply to other dispositions?
I would be very interested to hear your thoughts on that...
you've seen our beethoven trio opus 38?
I am trying to play J. Pachelbel. Werde munter, mein Gemüte (Choralvariationen) Every recording I have listened to are on organ and are too fast for me follow. I understand that the IV variation is written with demi semi quavers that are like trills. If I slow the piece down for my ability am I doing the piece a disservice. I am basically self taught and trills have always been a problem for me. The piece published by Schott metronome is: 104 - 1/4 note. I cannot find this piece recorded on piano other than the choral portion. I am sorry I cannot become a patron I just can not afford to be... I follow each UA-cam recording you out.
Wim...I don't know if your are aware of John Field. John was the originator of the nocturne prior but also at the same time as Chopin. Chopin even supposedly was aware of John Field.
The point being....that all pieces of music, no matter how unique, amazing or supposedly original all had a prototype from which they were made.
It is our job as admirers of music to not only seek out the originators or prototypes but to also search deeper for the meaning in the music.
This is a lifelong quest , so that whomever says that there is no more original or meaningful music anymore may have better insight into the mystery and true magic behind genius and all those that came thereafter .
melodymartel.wordpress.com/2014/07/28/john-field/
Let the shitstorm begin
🔥🔥🔥
So, the Trascendental etudes? Were they the effect on Listz of this perverse "extremely fast" way of playing of 19th century? Listz was more or less split in two? As you have told to us, he speaks of this "charlatan" way of playing, but, i think, we can make the same comparison beetween some playings by Horowitz and, for example, some things play by Lang Lang. I wouldn't use that quote in that way. However, bye Wim.
💜
Impressing the audience is why everyone wanted to pay to hear him play.. he had to earn as much as possible, musicians where poorly paid. Then
Chopin lived with Liszt while the speed movement occured, right? What did he have to say about his music getting played faster and faster?
Your interpretation of this quote is a very liberal one, given the little information that is given. If Liszt was playing on an organ, tempo change is only one of the variables he could have changed. Registration, for example, is a huge thing when you play baroque music on a romantic "symphonic" organ. The "charlatan" version may have included ornaments that weren't written (trills, arpeggios), the kind of things that are disgusting to educated listeners but astonish the crowds. In that category, we can include exaggerated gestures.
I'm not saying there were no tempo change between the three versions but, once again, this is very vague, and it would have been so much simpler to write "the different versions were getting faster and faster."
I wonder if his son-in-law drove him nuts...
Wim, how do you account for the fact that the premiere of Beethoven's 6th and 7th symphonies, alongside his 4th Piano concerto and other pieces, was at a concert that lasted 4 hours? By your theory this should've lasted at least 5, and that's not to account for the fact that there was an interlude in the concert which counted as part of the 4 hours, as well as when you think they would have to prepare the various pieces by bringing on different performers etc.
We were just discussing the concert further up/down, under Christian Engel's commentary. That is the concert from December 22nd, 1808, and it is the premiere of the 5th and 6th symphony, not the 7th. One of the things we f.ex. don't know, is to which degree they played the repetitions - they knew it was going to be a long concert, and it was rather common to skip repetitions at the time. The Choral Fantasy, which was also premiered, was planned to be played without the repetitions, and when Beethoven started to conduct it with, the music broke down, and they had to start over again. If you want to discuss this concert, too, I suggest we do it all in one place, so head over there. :-)
Claudia Bätcke Where is Christian Engel’s commentary?
@@Anyideas14 At the moment, it is further down from here, at least in how youtube shows me the comments, it was quite high up when we started to comment. It is the one with 23 replies (at the moment). It is not Christian himself who brought up the concert, just look for the name and open the replies. :-)
It gets clickbaitier and clickbaitier, I hope you don't lie in your title.
Win may be using a clickbeit title, but the content of his videos is always incredible!
What makes you believe I would "lie" Sinan? It is a strong word. And welcome to the world of UA-cam, the other opposite would be a black thumbnail and a question mark as title. Title and thumbnail here might be strong, but are entirely based upon what Liszt said.
@@antonczerny I know right? * - *
@@AuthenticSound I know, in case you didn't notice, I am absolutely astonished by your findings and proofs :D
Your titles always seem so impossible and yet you deliver exactly what you describe ^^
@@AuthenticSound You didn't disappoint me, as always.
Interpretation seems to be very much biased by the lens of culture at the time at which it is performed. The composer, which is also a player, is no doubt influenced in some way by that same "timely" culture and so, a degree of variation in real "intent" I feel will always be present. Most people have a hard time to really express what they feel with words, imagine a composer with music, regardless of his genius. Not an exact science indeed. At the end of the day, unless you have the composer sitting right next to you, instructing you on how he "hears" the piece in his mind, the next best thing is to simply play it to your best "feel" whatever that may be...and next Wednesday you might feel different about it too so...have fun, that's what music is for. Expressing oneself. That is the beauty of interpretation to me.
Hangon. What's speed got to do with his nos. 1 2 and 3?? You're missing his point badly.
I think that "charlatan" might not be the best translation into English. A charlatan is an impostor or con man, whereas the context suggests more of a superficial, showy, populist razzmatazz performance. Perhaps a word like extravagant, flamboyant, showy, ostentatious, bombastic, sensationalist, glittery, pretentious, facile, shallow, or flashy?
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I think this vid also proves that Chopin knew exactly what he was doing when he composed in op 10 etudes (one of his earliest opus numbers inspired by the “charlatan” playing of liszt)-to be played as fast as humanly possible!! Chopin was an admirer of liszt playing, so I think he wrote those etudes to be played fast, as he did dedicate them to Liszt! And if Chopin was an admirer of liszt don’t you think he would attempt to play like Liszt? Meaning none of his music would be played at whole beat? His scherzos, his ballades, his nocturnes, his etudes, his sonatas in today’s speed are all as I believe Chopin would have wanted as Chopin, once again was inspired by Liszt! To your theory tho it makes Chopin a charlatan too!
No! Most of the studies (op 10) were completed before Chopin came to Paris in 1831. -- Chopin is the CREATOR of modern piano technique: in his studies he devised new tools that allowed the next generation of pianists to play much quicker!
Cortot talks about it here:
ua-cam.com/video/maOywGBgzhA/v-deo.html
James Elliott sources quote Chopin saying this in a letter: “I hardly even know what my pen is scribbling, since at the moment Liszt is playing one of my etudes and distracting my attention from my respectable thoughts. I would love myself to acquire from him the manner in which he plays my [etudes].”
hubert drefus yes even if Chopin didn’t play them at today’s speed-I highly doubt it is wbpm speed-it does not mean he didn’t hear them in his head at that speed (which Wim mention all the time about Beethoven). What the composer wants is to hear what he heard in his head when thinking about the piece, and since these were dedicated to liszt I think it’s same to assume he heard liszt playing in his head when writing! And many book of op 10 say dedicated to F. Liszt, so I don’t know what your saying “No!” to.
Pittoresque means characterful and has nothing to do with speed.
dude, it's literally connected to tempo in this quote
@@AuthenticSound How?
I cannot find the original French only a translation '-“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'. - "nuances" is the key word. Presumably "picturesque movement" was 'mouvement pittoresque', which is a phrase I have seen used in the context of architecture - not at all related to tempo.
Look what your brother did to the door
1)So composers in the 19th century wrote their MM according to what they played as the audience would love (as a sarltan) or as the what the composer wants to hear?
2)you are saying that liszt was teaching his students according to what the audience wants to hear so did liszt preform and write his MM according what he has in mind or what the audience wants to hear?
3)Did they write those slow MM and played their pieces as they originally wanted it to be played and then comes another pianist play the same piece faster as the audience want to hear and then the audience love this playing more than what the original composers played their pieces? (Probably the same meaning of no 2 😅)
4)you said that changing tempo is changing every think so why when people comments that your playing is slow you say ((faster faster faster technic technic technic)) as if tempo and technic are not important in the performance?
those slow tempos 🤔🤔🤔
I talked about 4 points and you stick with one word I said and you consider it wrong.
Okay sorry I mean those tempos according to the theory you believe, now your turn.
Oh no no no
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Perhaps showman fits with charlatan..... Commercialism ..... and the need to make a living.
You are 1000 percent correct
the style of this title would suit a resentful child craving for power
Why don’t you write scholarly articles about all your theories?
i thought i was listening to tom cruise’s half brother
Wonderful. It was necessary to clear the stuff. Btw: in option 1 we musicians accept to be teached from the composer. Thats a rewars.
Sir what is the meaning of charlatan 😅😅😅?
someone who questions established preconceptions
@@VRnamek Thanks u
@jl5555ls thank you too !