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Franz Liszt is most well-known for his compositions for piano and orchestra, but his influence is also strong in chamber music, choral music, and orchestral transcriptions. This new collection of essays presents a scholarly overview of all of the composer's work, providing the most comprehensive and current treatment of both his oeuvre and the immense amount of secondary literature written about it. Highly regarded critics and scholars write for both a general and academic audience, covering all of Liszt's major compositions as well as the neglected gems found among his choral and chamber works.
Following an outline of the subject's life, The Liszt Companion goes on to detail Liszt's critical reception in the German press, his writings and letters, his piano and orchestral works, his neglected secular choral works, and his major organ compositions. Also explored here are his little-known chamber pieces and his songs. An exhaustive bibliography and index of works conclude the volume. This work will both elucidate aspects of Liszt's most famous work and revive interest in those pieces that deserve and require greater attention.
- Sales Rank: #2893519 in Books
- Published on: 2002-04-30
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.52" h x 1.25" w x 6.10" l, 1.80 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 488 pages
Review
..."notable for its completeness and its currency....even experts may find new information here. An excellent bibliography rounds out the volume. As a summary of contemporary Liszt scholarship, this book is indispensable, and it is recommended to all libraries."-Choice
?...notable for its completeness and its currency....even experts may find new information here. An excellent bibliography rounds out the volume. As a summary of contemporary Liszt scholarship, this book is indispensable, and it is recommended to all libraries.?-Choice
.,."notable for its completeness and its currency....even experts may find new information here. An excellent bibliography rounds out the volume. As a summary of contemporary Liszt scholarship, this book is indispensable, and it is recommended to all libraries."-Choice
About the Author
BEN ARNOLD is an Associate Professor of Music at Emory University and the author of Music and War: A Research and Information Guide. He has published many articles on Liszt in The Journal of the American Liszt Society, and his work has appeared frequently in journals including The Musical Quarterly.
Most helpful customer reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Far better than the Cambridge attempt, but rather badly flawed at few places
By Alexander Arsov
The Liszt Companion
Edited by Ben Arnold
Greenwood, Hardback, 2002.
8vo. 488 pp.
Contents
Editorial Note
Preface
I. LIFE, WRITINGS, AND RECEPTION
1. Franz Liszt: 1811-1886 Klara Hamburger
2. Liszt's Writings and Correspondence Charles Suttoni
3. Liszt in the German-Language Press James Deaville
II. THE YOUNG LISZT
4. The Early Works Michael Saffle
III. KEYBOARD MUSIC
5. Piano Music: 1835-1861 Ben Arnold
6. Piano Music: 1861-1886 Ben Arnold
7. Opera Paraphrases Charles Suttoni
8. Organ Music Marilyn Kielniarz
IV. INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC
9. Chamber Music William Wright
10. Orchestral Works Michael Saffle
11. Piano and Orchestra Works Jay Rosenblatt
12. Orchestral Transcriptions Jay Rosenblatt
V. VOCAL MUSIC
13. Sacred Choral Works Michael Saffle
14. Secular Choral Works Kristin Wendland
15. Songs and Melodramas Ben Arnold
Selected Bibliography
Index of Works
Index of Names and Subjects
Contributors
=========================================
Perhaps I really misunderstand the meaning of this type of books. What exactly is a ''companion'' supposed to be? Is it some kind of ''Guide for Research'', or is it something like encyclopedia, but concentrated on certain specialised subject which is presented in with the utmost degree of scholarship, or is it something in the middle? I should have liked the second alternative to be the real one, but it seems the last one is truer to the facts, even though the whole concept often degenerates into guide-for-research stuff. But I guess it is asking too much to have one volume containing everything about Liszt; after all, only his detailed life took Alan Walker three volumes and about 1600 pages. Since Mr Walker is unlikely to be equaled in this field, let alone surpassed, it is much better that such ''Liszt companions'' concentrate almost exclusively on Liszt's music. Here a problem arises again. Liszt's output was so stupendous and so diverse, that it is unreasonable to expect that it can be fully covered in one volume, no matter how eminent and how many Liszt scholars you are able to get together. Last but certainly not least, there is another, personal, problem with such ''companions''. Are they for trained musicians or are they for lay readers? As a member of the latter group, I am inclined to think that these ''companions'' make much more rewarding read for those who are fortunate enough to be able to read music fluently; it also helps a lot if they are competent pianists, or have experience with reading scores or conducting orchestra, why not some rather above the basic knowledge of instruments, harmony, orchestration and counterpoint, too. The layman should make allowances for tons of music examples, from simple chords on the piano to whole pages of orchestral scores, which are perhaps inevitable in a book of that kind. So the layman should learn the art of skipping.
But enough rambling.
Getting straight to the point, the ''Liszt Companion'' edited by Ben Arnold is almost embarrassingly superior to the one edited by Kenneth Hamilton, even though the latter is more recently published. The only thing both books have in common is that they both concentrate almost exclusively on Liszt's music, leaving his life and personality in the background - this is all for the better, as I've already said, for none of the doubtless eminent and competent scholars among the authors here is any match for Alan Walker. The Ben Arnold Companion, however, is infinitely more detailed, better written and more perceptive than the Hamilton one. Some silly prejudices remain of course, but for the most part the earlier book has a more balanced and appreciative view of Liszt's works than their colleagues from the ''Cambridge' rival' are able to provide. It is interesting to note that Ben Arnold is American whereas Ken Hamilton is English; though the same distinction cannot be made for most of their contributors, it is singular that there is only one writer who wrote for both books (James Deaville); also, in Ben Arnold's companion the name and the excellent, scholarly liner notes, not to mention stupendous recording achievements, of Leslie Howard are much more rarely, if ever, mentioned than in Ken Hamilton's one. Is there some kind of English-American rivalry here or is this just my fancy? I hope the latter is true. For if the former happens to exist, it will be one of the greatest ironies in the musical history: petty national prejudices cast a shadow on the scholarship of Franz Liszt, the most international among all Romantic composers. Just a tad too silly to be amusing.
Just like the Cambridge Companion, this one also has three introductory chapters solely concentrating on Liszt's life, personality and other supposedly irrelevant to the music matters. Quite unlike the Cambridge Companion though, the three chapters here make an absorbing and richly rewarding read. Only occasionally are these pieces marred by silly preconceptions or laboured writing style.
Klara Hamburger's essay is an admirably succinct exposition of Liszt's life and work. A lot of details are omitted, certainly, but Frau Hamburger manages to capture beautifully the essence of Liszt's character, his vast output and his place in the history of the XIX century music. But there are several curious remarks and significant drawbacks in this chapter. At one place Frau Hamburger tells that though Liszt created many masterpieces, he was not one of those composers who composed ONLY(my emphasis) masterpieces. Who are these composers, Klara? Bach? Handel? Mozart? Beethoven? Any of these geniuses composed many works which are not masterpieces at all. Only the mediocre is always at his best; but, on the other hand, if the personality of a composer is sufficiently unique and his genius unprecedented enough, even his worst failures are well worth investigating. In addition, Frau Hamburger is distinctly prejudiced - and admitted as much. At one place she flatly states that, for her, the best works of Liszt are those from his post-Weimar period. Now if you want to be a scholar, you had better jettison as speedily as possible such silly notions, Klara. I am all for viewing Liszt's lifelong development as a composer separated into periods which is of course inevitable, all the more so since Liszt had one of the longest creative lives among the great composers (some 65 years!) and, granted for some overlapping of course, the three main periods of his life are markedly different in terms of his compositions: the pre-Weimar years were almost exclusively concentrated on music for solo piano, most of Liszt's opera paraphrases and original works (at least as drafts or first versions) were composed during these years; the Weimar years were without any doubt Liszt's most intensely creative as far as his orchestral works are concerned, no fewer than 12 symphonic poems, two program symphonies and the ''Deux épisodes d'apres le Faust de Lenau'' were created during that time; finally, Liszt's post-Weimar years saw the birth, or at least the completion, of his large scale choral works as well as a good deal of religious music. But comparing these periods, and works especially, is downright silly, not to say idiotic. First of all, even works in one genre from different periods are hardly comparable: how do you compare, for instance, ''Grand Galop Chromatique'' with the Second Ballade? Out of question: they were composed in different times, for different purposes and by a largely different men. And how do you compare three hours oratorio with ten minutes orchestral piece like Mephisto Waltz No. 1? The question is rhetorical of course. The most fascinating things about Liszt as a composer certainly are his outstanding versatility and his unprecedented development. That is the reason why his output should always be viewed as a whole, no matter how many periods one splits it into for pedagogical or other purposes. Liszt's late piano pieces, for example, are truly prophetic and revolutionary for its time, but the most compelling thing about them is the fact that they were composed by the same men who had earlier transcribed the Beethoven symphonies for solo piano, weaved numerous famous operatic themes into a number of grand fantasies and created large scale original works hardly less daring for their time than the late pieces. If all that tremendous amount of Liszt scholarship during the last few decades has thought us anything, it is that he always was sincere in his compositions; whether he composed solely for his own pleasure, or to popularise the works of others, or to please the fickle and empty-headed public, Liszt always did so self-consciously; he was not a man to fool himself or those around him, especially with his music. Unbelievable as it seems, Liszt's astonishing versatility and development as a composer were apparently mirrored by equally astonishing versatility and development of his personality, Romantic rhetoric, religious devotion and all. By insisting on Liszt's works from one period being superior to that of another, Klara Hamburger not only completely misses the point but she also questions her own integrity as a Liszt scholar.
Charles Suttoni's ''Liszt's Writings and Correspondence'' is a minor masterpiece brilliantly summarising in just a few pages one of the most controversial issues about Liszt: how much of his literary output was written by him, and how much by the two most important women in his life. Agreement between the scholars have yet to be achieved - probably it never will be. Mr Suttoni deals with this tricky problem in a most elegant way. He simply rushes through the Liszt's books and articles until he reaches the personal correspondence; not only are there no problems with authorship or style here, but Liszt's correspondence - immensely voluminous and with who's who of musical XIX century - gives much fuller and deeper picture of both Liszt himself and the remarkable times he lived through. Sadly, the highly recommended by Mr Suttoni collection of Liszt's letters (edited by Adrian Williams) is out of print, second hand copies are available but only at monstrous prices. As for the essay by James Deaville - the only common author between both companions, significantly - it is the most disappointing of the three, partly perhaps due to the fact that it is a pioneer study in a completely neglected area so far. Mr Deaville has few interesting comments about the press response to Liszt's virtuoso career and the later ''War of the Romantics'' in which the Weimar circle around Liszt represented the New German School, or the Music of the Future if you like, although Liszt himself never took part in it. On the whole, Mr Deaville makes in the beginning a shrewd remark that most authors have neglected this primary source for Liszt because they couldn't see beyond the biographical inaccuracies of such press articles - but he then fails completely to convince me that it really is worth while looking beyond.
When we come to the stunning legacy of Liszt's compositions, the companion edited by Ben Arnold is, yet again, infinitely superior that its Cambridge counterpart. A good many works more are covered, to start with, in far greater detail and, generally, in a more balanced and sympathetic way. The danger of this method is that the authors often indulge in pretty wild interpretations of Liszt's programmatic works - most of his works, that is. Since these interpretations are almost never supplied with a footnotes indicating any primary source, I have to suppose that they were proposed by those who wrote the companion. Well, there is nothing wrong with that in general, but I cannot help but being reminded of Deryck Cooke's profound statement which, if I may paraphrase his words, would sound like this: ''the question is not "What meaning can WE find in Liszt's works, but ''What exactly did LISZT really MEAN by them.'' (I have preserved Mr Cooke's emphasis.) Personally I have no objection to personal interpretations of great works of art if they come from a fine mind, that is a mind in which the intellectual and the passionate nature are equally, if not always peacefully, presented. But with scholars the former tends to overshadow the latter, and when a somewhat more Romantic approach is used by so scholarly a mind it does sound unconvincing and often borders on ludicrousness. Still, there are some appealing ideas - the symphonic poem ''Mazeppa'' starting with whipping the legendary horse, or the harps in the first part of 'Dante Symphony' suggesting the shivering lovers, for instance - but when they try to convince me that using two basic tonalities in ''Sposalizio'' might have been Liszt's way to depict the the two visual planes in Rafael's eponymous picture that is known to have inspired the piece, I positively look askance. Do these people really think that Liszt could possibly have been inspired by so mundane a detail as that? Last and least, it actually goes without saying that the layman is bound to be confronted with numerous musical examples, including whole pages of orchestral scores, and abominably detailed dissections section by section, bar by bar, note by note. Trained musicians might like to know that the reproductions of the orchestral scores are often poor: too small and with many details hardly readable.
As fitting responsibility to the chief editor, Ben Arnold has written three full chapters, two of which are the most important ones in the book: Liszt's piano works from 1835 to 1886 (the youthful compositions are covered by Michael Saffle but they are much less important). On the whole, Ben Arnold has done a fine job. He discusses all of Liszt's major cycles and large scale works for piano in commendable detail; the evolution of each piece, the putative sources of inspiration, relevant quotes printed in the score, etc., are given in a well ordered manner and lucidly written. Considering the extremely complicated history of some of Liszt's most important cycles, it is worth noting that about the Transcendental Studies and ''Harmonies poétiques et religieuses'' extremely useful tables are provided showing in a most convenient way how the individual pieces evolved from each other. I only wish similar tables had been provided about the equally complex evolution of the Hungarian Rhapsodies or ''Années de pèlerinage'' (the first two books especially). So even the lay reader, who is simply compelled to skip about a half of these chapters, can find a lot of fascinating information about his favourite works here, well structured and easy to locate. I have to admit, though, that Mr Arnold's style and content do not erase memories of Leslie Howard's witty, fascinating and conscientious liner notes accompanying all 59 volumes of his own recording of Liszt's Complete Piano Works.
Though generally speaking I am delighted with Mr Arnold's judgements - it is very pleasant to see the First ballade described as ''outstanding, tightly organised work'' - he might sometimes get carried away with his analyses, as in the case of ''Sposalizio'' mentioned above. I have already pointed out that I certainly don't mind somewhat far-fetched suggestions about Liszt's programmatic works, even if Liszt himself never thought of them, but there are limits to this. It is also strange to find Mr Arnold describing ''Le mal du pais'' as ''uninspired'' and goes on fantasising about the piece being evocative of wide, undulating stretches of land, or some other nonsense to that effect. ''Le mal du pais'', as part of the ''First year'' of ''Années de pèlerinage'', has always been sadly neglected and overshadowed by other, more large-scale pieces of the cycle, most notably (as in Mr Arnold's case, too) by ''Vallée d'Obermann''. The latter is no doubt among Liszt greatest masterpieces, but this doesn't make the smaller pieces any less significant, even taken separately; ''Le mal du pais'', often given in English as ''Homesickness'', is one of the most moving pieces Liszt ever wrote as far as I am concerned, and to find it described as ''uninspired'', with the grudging admission of having ''charm'' and this perfectly commonplace ''interpretation'', is just a little short of shameful treatment. Finally, with regard to ''Venezia e Napoli'', another often underestimated masterpiece of Liszt, Mr Arnold is sufficiently detailed about the history of the pieces and he of course mentions that they are based on themes of other composers, but he doesn't have a single word to say what exactly the originals were and how exactly Liszt reshaped them. The three pieces sound so Lisztian that I am ready to believe the ethereal finale of ''Gondoliera'', the ominous bass line of ''Canzone'' and the flamboyant outer sections, not to mention the enchanting middle one, of the concluding ''Tarantella'' have nothing to do with Peruchini, Rossini and Cottrau who supplied the initial material. But Mr Arnold is not alone here - virtually all Liszt's scholars I have encountered so far, Leslie Howard included, fail to add this important bit of information to Liszt literature.
Mr Arnold's chapter about Liszt's songs fares better than his chapters about the piano works. But this is perhaps due to the fact that this is a much smaller and much more neglected (still) part of Liszt's output. It is to Mr Arnold's credit that he dare rank Liszt among the greatest masters of the song, together with Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and Wolf; few Liszt scholars have the guts to do that. His discussions of the revisions most songs underwent during the Weimar years is often illuminating, even for the layman.
What is more disconcerting about the companion as a whole is the fact that sometimes the level of scholarship is quite low. As a matter of fact, there is at least one colossal blunder which makes me think how many more (minor ones?) still remain undiscovered. In his somewhat perfunctory and superficial chapter on Liszt's opera paraphrases, Charles Suttoni informs us that the Figaro fantasy is known only in Busoni's completed version. For something first published in 2002 and making pretenses to be scholarly, this is a major and unforgivable mistake. As far back as 1993 Leslie Howard recorded the full version of this piece, titled ''Fantasie über Themen aus den Opern von Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Die Hochzeit des Figaro und Don Giovanni'' and left unfinished by Liszt. But as Leslie made clear in his exemplary as usual liner notes (Vol. 30), just a few bars were needed to rend the work performable; indeed, some 20 bars or so were needed but this isn't really much when one considers that the whole piece is more than 600 bars. Not only did Leslie complete and record the piece, but in 1997 his version was even published. Therefore, Mr Suttoni was writing a perfect nonsense that really should not have been published at all. How so fine a musical mind and ardent Liszt promoter as Feruccio Busoni could mutilate a fine work by cutting the whole part from ''Don Giovanni'' (about one third of the piece) passes belief - but that's a rather different story. Mr Suttoni is definitely contemptuous towards the work but his contempt seems to be dedicated entirely to Liszt and the devilish virtuosity of the piece; that might seem all too natural of course but it is indeed puzzling, to say the least, since Mr Suttoni gives us a footnote in which he mentions the original piece and recommends a Ken Hamilton's study for more information. It is all the more surprising then, that Mr Suttoni should write about ''boisterous, bombastic'' paraphrase and scorn those who played it, for he obviously neither listened to Leslie Howard's recording nor read his liner notes or published version, let alone the original unfinished manuscript by Liszt (from which Mr Howard worked of course). It is worth noting, for Mr Suttoni's sake, that the piece in question is most valuable at least because it is just the second such based on Mozart's themes Liszt's ever composed, it is also one of the very few of his paraphrases which is based on themes of two operas and last, but certainly not least, in his liner notes Leslie Howard provides a fascinating interpretation of the several themes and their development. Too bad (or not?) Mr Suttoni has apparently never seen it. How many other works you had never heard or had any idea about did you discuss so scholarly, Mr Suttoni?
(As a matter of fact, it is doubtful that Mr Suttoni has ever heard Liszt's Phantasiestück über Motive aus Rienzi, either. Otherwise it is perfectly beyond me how he could describe the piece as ''pedestrian, lacklustre''. Though Rienzi is far from Wagner's mature masterpieces, it has some excellent tunes and Liszt has combined some of them into a rather ingenious and inventive piece, the only one of its kind when it comes to Wagner's material. Pity he never transcribed the overture to Rienzi.)
I have nothing against Mr Arnold and Mr Suttoni, but it is Leslie Howard who should have written their chapters.
After the piano music chapters, the most important one surely is ''Orchestral Works'' by Michael Saffle. It is also a chapter more problematic one than most others. Mr Saffle is pleasantly detailed discussing each one of the 12 symphonic poems created in Weimar, but he could have been a little more so about the two program symphonies, the treatment of ''Faust'' is especially trite. But the problems lie chiefly in Mr Saffle's opinions and judgements about the programmatic contents of Liszt's music and its putative interpretation, not to mention a certain degree of indolence for he quotes his colleagues just a little too often, Humprey Searle most notably (which proves yet again the classic status of the latter's ''The Music of Liszt''). Indeed, Mr Saffle sometimes quotes and agree with some of the most spectacular nonsense of Mr Searle, primary example here being the scathing attack on the symphonic poem ''Mazeppa''. It seems that derogatory, to put it mildly, attitude to this piece is something of a leitmotif among many Liszt scholars. I take issue with these gentlemen. Admittedly, ''Mazeppa'' is not among Liszt's subtlest or most profound works; but it is such by design, and the story that it depicts/was inspired by (depends on your view on program music) can hardly be called subtle or profound, can it not? When performed with the right combination of passion and restraint, Liszt's ''Mazeppa'' has power and grandeur that are to my mind far from ''vulgar'' and ''shallow''. It also works astonishingly well as one of Liszt's most pictorial symphonic poems - which leads me to the highly controversial issue that still reigns supreme among scholars, so much more so if they happen to be concerned chiefly with Liszt's music.
Michael Saffle in his chapter ''Ochestral Works'' has the audacity to challenge the opinion of both Humprey Searle and Alan Walker that Liszt was never interested so much in using music for painting a picture or telling a story; he was, indeed, far more concerned with expression of philosophical ideas or characters. Now Mr Saffle is an eminent figure in the field of Liszt scholarship and if anybody has the right to challenge such exalted Lisztians like Mr Searle and Mr Walker, it is he. But his arguments are weak and confused; for the most part he is supremely unconvincing. Mr Saffle points out three examples showing how Liszt depicted exact characters and events: the distant trumpets in ''Mazeppa'' that suggest the rescue of the eponymous hero; the Ophelia theme in ''Hamlet'' and the nightingale song in ''Der nächtliche Zug''. Very well; but only the second of these, as admitted by Mr Saffle too, has been made explicit by Liszt. The other two - plausible and fascinating they may be - are simply conjectures. Even if Liszt did depict certain pictorial elements in his poems - which is not so unlikely of course - we know very little about that, much less do we have any idea precisely what Liszt thought, felt or wanted to say with this music; Mr Saffle's recommendation of this or that ''painstaking semiotic analyses'' or responses from listeners are very wide of the mark indeed: there is scant information about the former and analyses are hardly possible, let alone in a painstaking manner; as for the latter, it is invalidated by the simple chronological fact that Liszt's titles and programs were there long before the listeners can make head nor tail of the music: the responses to the music, in this particular case, have always been largely - if not entirely! - function of the primary sources Liszt provided.
But even if we do accept that from time to time Liszt was concerned with musical representation of very specific things, it is beyond any reasonable doubt that he was infinitely more concerned with ideas, characters and, occasionally, events; and the last two are certainly much too vague and amorphous stuff to be compared with a nightingale song. Therefore challenging Searle and Walker in this respect hardly makes any sense. Incidentally, in his discussion of the separate symphonic poems, Mr Saffle seems to come to this opinion too, consciously or not. He agrees that ''Ce qu'on entend sur la montagne'' and ''Die Ideale'' can be described as works of ''philosophical programmism'', more concerned with ideas than with individuals; works like ''Festklänge'', Hungaria'' or ''Orpheus'' do not even have any special programs, except a short comment that an Etruscan vase was the inspiration for the last one; ''Hamlet'' has obviously a lot to do with the famous character of Shakespeare (and with Ophelia, apparently) but everything certain ends here; even vaguer is the program of ''Les Preludes'', not least because the infamous ''scandal'' with the poetical source(s) of inspiration; for ''Prometheus'' Liszt gives the very detailed ''program'' that central for the work is ''suffering''. So trying to pin down Liszt's symphonic poems to the last detail doesn't make much sense: it is not possible, for one thing, and it robs the music of a great deal of its attraction, more importantly indeed. Nor are oversimplifications like Mr Saffle's claim that Liszt told the same story many times, namely from struggle, through suffering to glory, needed in a book which is supposed to be scholarly reliable reference.
The ''Dante Symphony'' is another example of Mr Saffle's somewhat preposterous and certainly very high-handed opinions. His criticism of the concluding ''Magnificat'', though a trifle too harsh, is just and often echoed by other scholars; indeed we have a reason to be sorry that Liszt never composed ''Paradiso'', for surely it was within his powers to depict the Paradise in music, and now the symphony does indeed look somewhat unfinished - but it is rather brilliantly left so. After waxing lyrical about Liszt's orchestration in the symphony, Mr Saffle ask the very wise and profound question: why Liszt, who knew Dante's work so well, did not depict more of it in music? Then he continues in the same remarkable way:
''The Inferno must have suggested more to him than musical fire and brimstone, punctuated by cameo of Paolo and Francesca engulfed in their shared sin...''
Significantly, however, Mr Saffle omits to mention what that ''more'' might be. And if he doesn't know, how on earth could be so sure that Liszt really didn't depict that ''more'' in music? Perhaps Liszt knew only too well that trying to depict too much may well lead to a mess of a symphony. Perhaps, just perhaps, Mr Saffle can be likened to the drunkard who looked for his lost key under the lamp - not because he had lost it there, but because the light was there. He would have been well advised to try to put his no doubt brilliant intelligence in service of Liszt, not against him. He should have tried to supply plausible hypotheses and explanations about what Liszt's did try in his works, not what he should have but did not. If anything, Liszt certainly knew his mind and his music better than Mr Saffle.
More or less all chapters about the music of Liszt's have the same pros and cons: they are detailed as far compositional history is concerned, very well organised (with tables of the works composed during certain period) and not at all lacking in some insights and perceptive points; but there is not even one chapter in the whole book which is not compromised by far-fetched, not to say ludicrous, extrapolations about Liszt's works, and almost constant boggling down in excessive details that make Liszt's works all the more difficult to understand, not to mention exhaustive technical analyses which are totally unreadable and, though I understand they are indispensable, could at least have been shortened. All the same, the Liszt Companion by Ben Arnold does worth the time and the money, for the book is neither very easy to find nor in the least cheap, of any dedicated Lisztian; it almost completely replaces the Cambridge Companion to Liszt edited by Kenneth Hamilton, though the latter is also worth having (especially considering that it is much cheaper) for some additional nuances. The perfect addition to any such companion, however, remains Leslie Howard's stupendous series - now available as a handsome box set: Liszt: The Complete Piano Music - of the Complete Piano Music of Liszt together with his excellent, scholarly but surprisingly entertaining, liner notes. The last word about program music is that, whatever the power of the words in the program, music must stand, or fall, as music.
P. S. Those for whom the admittedly high price is too high, the classic book of Humphrey Searle (The Music of Liszt (Second Revised Edition)) and the excellent collection of essays edited by Alan Walker (Franz Liszt (Man & His Music)) are greatly superior resources about Liszt's music than either the Cambridge companion or the one edited by Ben Arnold. One caveat however: both books are badly dated in terms of biographical details and really should be consulted after one is familiar with Alan Walker's definitive biography of Liszt:
Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years, 1811-1847, Vol. 1 (Franz Liszt)
Franz Liszt, Vol. 2: The Weimar Years, 1848-1861
Franz Liszt, Vol. 3: The Final Years, 1861-1886
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