Alan Walker reflects on Liszt

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[img_inline align=”right” src=”http://padnws01.mcmaster.ca/images/AlanWalker.jpg” caption=”Alan Walker, emeritus professor of music.”]It's not every day that one has the opportunity to address someone who has been dead for nearly 100 years. Except for Alan Walker, who wrote an open letter to Franz Liszt's in his newly released book, Relections on Liszt.

“My “Open Letter to Franz Liszt”, which forms the Epilogue to the book, gave me most pleasure to write,” says Walker, on the heels of releasing his 14th published book on the composer.

Relections on Liszt is a series of essays that tell not only about the phenomenon that was Franz Liszt, but also about the musical and cultural life of nineteenth-century Europe. In the book, Walker muses on aspects of Liszt's life and work that he was unable to explore in his acclaimed three-volume biography of the great composer and pianist.

“The impulse to write this book arose from a desire to pursue certain topics that had to be glossed over in the course of publishing my three-volume life of Franz Liszt,” Walker says. “Voltaire once reminded us, “If you would be dull, tell all.””

Walker's Liszt biography spanned more than 1,600 pages. “Even so,” he says, “in consequence of Voltaire's injunction, it remained highly compressed. Such was the variety of Liszt's life and work, that there were some things that could be mentioned only in passing, and others not at all. I promised myself that I would one day return to these topics in order to elaborate on them, and it is a pleasure to do so now.”

Topics include: Liszt's contributions to the Lied; the lifelong impact of his encounter with Beethoven; his influence on his most famous students -Tausig, von Bulow, and Bache; his accomplishments in transcribing and editing the works of other composers; his innovative piano technique; the Sonata in B Minor, perhaps Liszt's single most celebrated composition.

Walker draws heavily on Liszt's astonishingly large personal correspondence with other composers, critics, pianists, and prominent public figures. All the essays reveal Walker's broad and deep knowledge of Liszt and Romantic music generally and, in some cases, his impatience with contemporary performance practice.

Alan Walker is professor emeritus of music at McMaster and author of numerous books, including The Death of Franz Liszt Based on the Unpublished Diary of His Pupil Lina Schmalhausen; Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years, 1811-1847 (volume 1); The Weimar Years, 1848-1861 (volume 2); and The Final Years, 1861-1886 (volume 3) all from Cornell. He has been awarded the Royal Philharmonic Society Prize and the medal Pro Cultura Hungarica, presented by the President of Hungary.