Liszt told his pupil Gollerich: ‘Beethoven appeared at my second Viennese concert for Czerny’s sake and kissed me on the forehead. I never played at his house but I visited him twice.’ Whether the 11-year-old Liszt really did receive the master’s consecrating kiss has always been something of a vexed question, though the fact that the meetings took place has never been in doubt. The consequences of the encounters were immense. In the decades which followed, Liszt became the foremost exponent of Beethoven’s piano music as well as Beethoven’s principal cheer-leader in continental Europe. He owned Beethoven’s Broadwood piano and the Danhauser death-mask and briefly had the ‘Heiligenstadt Testament’ in his possession. He was also the moving spirit – after a decade of bureaucratic muddle and civic indifference – behind the raising of a memorial statue to Beethoven in his native city of Bonn.
Liszt invested 10,000 francs of his own money in the project and spent six years fund-raising before the statue was finally unveiled in August 1845. The unveiling itself was a famously chaotic occasion which bears interesting comparison with the New Year’s Eve debacle at the Millennium Dome. Anyone who was anyone in European affairs descended on Bonn. (Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, in the middle of a German tour which was itself a public relations disaster, were among those present.) All of which came as an immense surprise to Bonn itself which, as Liszt discovered only three weeks before the event, had made minimal provision for the invasion.
To mark the occasion, Liszt wrote his Festival Cantata for the Unveiling of the Beethoven Statue, of which the present CD is the first recording. The cantata, too, became embroiled in controversy at the first performance. The royal party arrived only as it was ending; at which point Liszt raised his baton and played the entire 30-minute work again. It was another nail in his coffin. According to Berlioz, who left a riveting report of the festival, Liszt took the rap for everything precisely because he alone emerged from the shambles with any distinction.
The Cantata is in four parts. A festal opening welcomes the guests, quarried from the same source Wagner would later mine for the public scenes in Lohengrin and Die Meistersinger. A sombre, swirling interlude addresses time’s passing and so sets up the argument of the cantata’s central movement: that genius alone transcends time. The final movement is based on the Andante cantabile of Beethoven’s Archduke Piano Trio, solemnly intoned by horns in four parts with supporting winds before the tenor launches the actual hymn to Beethoven, ‘He whom no night enshrouds…’. The end is suitably rumbustious in the Beethoven style. Indeed, were you to play the cantata to someone ‘blind’ it would not be unreasonable for them to conclude that this was one of Beethoven’s own occasional public pieces. Berlioz admired the cantata’s orchestration. But, if you take it for what it is, the whole thing is hugely enjoyable. It has dash and imagination and does no-one – least of all Beethoven or Liszt himself – a disservice.
The performance is splendid and the coupling, Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy, is shrewdly chosen. The performance of the Beethoven yields something to the Robert Levin/John Eliot Gardiner recording on Archiv in as much as the period fortepiano used by Paul Komen sounds somewhat overparted and incongruously harp-like. Both fortepianos are by the same maker (Salvatore la Grassa) and from the same collection (Edwin Beunck). Komen himself is not quite in the Levin class; but the real problem lies with the engineers who, seduced by the sheer oomph of Weil’s reading, give undue prominence to the already bruisingly powerful orchestral and choral contributions. That said, it is the Liszt cantata which is the principal dish here; the Beethoven is merely the agreeable dessert