Liszt: St. Francois d’Assise. La prédication aux oiseaux – arranged for organ

“Piss off Brahms!” – quote attributed to Franz Liszt*

I’ll admit that in the realm of composers, Liszt is someone I’ve never got on with. I expect that he would not be upset about this. One part of this antagonism lies in the whole audience-swoons-as-he-thrills-on-the-piano thing he encouraged. It seems that we owe the whole pianistic cliché of throwing yourself about while gurning and grimacing in ecstasy directly to Liszt. I much prefer the cool calm collected demeanour to the ‘oh my god, are they about to vomit on the keyboard?’ look of some pianists.

Which is why it’s surprising to me that Saint-Saens, whose own performing style was so much NOT in the over-the-top camp, was such an admirer of Liszt.“The artist and the man seemed to belong to fairyland…” he once wrote of the older composer (presumably not meaning that “he was away with the fairies”) “…the influence he had on the destiny of the piano was immense”.

The admiration was mutual. Liszt wrote of Saint-Saens in 1878: “I know no one, among contemporary artists, who is of equal talent, and, among organists, he is not just of a first rank but is actually incomparable”. No wonder, then, that Saint-Saens dedicated his final, and most famous, symphony (the “Organ” symphony) to Liszt. They were serious mutual admirers.

I can recall a book on great composers I had when I was a child that had a picture of Liszt giving a concert with the added caption “the composer Saint-Saens is seated in the front row”. I’ve tried hard to find that picture, but to no end. So here’s another picture of Liszt staring wistfully while his fingers do the walking, with Berlioz and Rossini listening on instead (they are standing).

The second reason why Liszt leaves me cold is that I’ve always seen his works as technically dazzling and virtuosic, but at their heart fairly musically …well, banal. I tend to lump Liszt, in this respect, with Paganini. The analogy I would draw (one shared with, I think, a lot of modern music**) is with that of special-effects laden blockbuster film. It’s all ‘ooh and aah’ but later it’s disappointment that the storyline sucked (as the famously grumpy film-critic Leslie Halliwell wrote, perhaps unfairly and certainly inaccurately***, of Return of the Jedi…. “More heartless fireworks illuminated by a permanently retarded director with too much clout and cash”).

Saint-Saens, however, did not share my view on showy virtuosity, or Liszt’s particular variety of it. “It is virtuosity itself I want to defend. It is the source of the picturesque in music, it gives the artist wings with whose help he escapes platitudes and the everyday. The conquered difficulty is itself the beautiful thing”*** – “[Liszt] did not aim at difficulties (which did not exist for him), but at a picturesque effect…. Indeed, in his works for the piano he never makes virtuosity an end, but always a means. If not judged by this standard his music becomes the reverse of what it was intended to be, and is rendered unintelligible” **** – so clearly I’ve fallen into this latter trap. But actually, I don’t think Liszt’s music is unintelligible, just a bit ….well…. superficial.

But, it’s my problem, and I’m dealing with it with help from Liszt’s orchestral music, which is at least not burdened with monstrous arpeggios and demonic trills.

When Saint-Saens came, sometime****** between 1863 and 1878 to arrange Liszt’s Prédication aux oiseaux, a musical depiction of the avian benedictions of St Francis (of Assisi – the ‘birds are my friends’ guy), he made full use of organ’s effects to colour what was, already, a fairly rich and colourful piece. If Liszt’s aim was to make the piano sound like an orchestra, then Saint-Saens was equable able to do so with the organ.

Whether this makes the piece any more interesting is a moot point. But since this isn’t a moot (and the organ isn’t a Moog) – I’ll simply state that it doesn’t. It’s all twittery trills in the high flute register, and contemplative chorale like religiosity in the lower registers (though always quite gently, this isn’t a big booming piece). I mean, it’s birds and preaching right? So, I suppose, that it ‘does exactly what it says on the tin’. But what you have beyond that is music that is not particularly different from Dance of the Hours.

So, in short I don’t love it, and it surprises me that someone like Saint-Saens, whose own music is so ‘classical’ in outlook, would find Liszt and his indulgences such a focus of idolatry. But Liszt was more than happy. Writing to Saint-Saens in 1882, he said: “I am still quite struck with wonder at your Prédication aux oiseaux. You use you organ as an orchestra in an incredible way, as only a great composer and a great performer like yourself could. The most proficient organists in all countries have only to take off their hats to you”. So, if you’re a Liszt fan, this comes with the ultimate approval.

La prédication aux oiseaux, Liszt arr. Saint-Saens

Why you might want to listen to it: Gives you an impression of what Saint-Saens can do with his organ (and it’s not threaten Liszt with it)********\

Why you might want avoid it: tweet tweet twittery twittery tweet hum hum hum hum tweet tweet twittery twittery tweet hum hum hum hum – repeat ad nauseam.

* OK, not really. But it is a line of dialogue in Ken Russell’s film Lisztomania, which as the trailer below show is perhaps not an entirelyauthentic account of Liszt’s life and loves. The casting of Ringo Starr as the Pope being an example of it’s ….er…. daring(?) take on real-life events (though the scenes where Liszt pilots a spaceship, and is threatened with a giant penis don’t appear in Lives of the Great Composers, to my recollection)*******

** I should say that this is not a grumpy ‘I don’t like that modern tuneless stuff’ reactionary stance. I have no problem at all with modern music, be it atonal, minimalist, avant garde, contemporary or whatever. There’s just as much crap baroque music as there is crap modern music – it’s just that one way that the crap modern music is crap is when instrumental pieces are entirely ‘colour’ (i.e. weird effects where the end of a clarinet is placed in jelly, or the violinist has to play in a sealed box) and no substance.

*** George Lucas, to whom this quote presumably refers, did not actually direct Return of the Jedi. That was Richard Marquand, who subsequently directed Bob Dylan in the not-very-good Hearts of Fire.

**** as quoted by Dana Gooley in “Saint-Saens and the Perfomers Prestige” – in Camille Saint-Saens and his world, edited by Jann Pasler.

***** For more of Saint-Saens on Liszt, in perhaps excessive detail – see here

****** it’s really not certain when this was arranged, Liszt wrote the original in 1863 and is known to have heard it in 1878.

******* not sure if you can have footnotes to footnotes except that the aforementioned Leslie Halliwell had little time for Lisztomania either (perhaps more understandably) and called the film “The most excessive and obscene of all this director’s controversial works, incapable of criticism on normal terms except that it seems unusually poor in production values”

******** see footnote * above. *********

********* Ok, I really need a numbering system for footnotes now.