Here is a discerning critic's disapproving, disappointed, and indeed disgusted review of an 1841 performance by the thirty-year-old Liszt. After this, forty-five years were to elapse before Liszt dared return to Great Britain!
As I have often maintained, it is every executant's duty first and foremost to be as faithful as he can to the wishes of the composer as set down in the score. How many fail in that simple and essentially straightforward duty!
The point of any truly
serious concert must be what the composer wants or wanted, never what the executant wants. That what the executant wants is what the composer wants should go without saying should it not!
[By the way, Liszt's fellow-performers in the Septetto, on flute, oboe, horn, viola, violoncello and contra basso, were Messrs. Ribas, H. Cooke, Jarrett, Loder, Lindley and Dragonetti; but oddly enough the anonymous critic deemed only Liszt worthy of mention.]
"After", perhaps - but not, I imagine "as a direct consequence of"! Interesting as this may be as a piece of contemporary criticism of its time, you do seem to cite very old texts as though they contain some kind of wisdom purely by virtue of their date on a perceived assumption that they may be taken to be as pertinent today as they might (or might not) have been when published which seems to me at the very least to be a strategy as perplexing as it is risky!
You write that you have "often explained [that] it is every executant's simple duty to be as faithful as he can to the wishes of the composer as set down in the score", adding that, in your view, "lamentably many fail in that simple duty!". Leaving aside the fact that "he" should read "he or she", what
is so "simple" about this?
We do indeed have a good many more HIPPs these days than was the case at the time of Liszt's lower middle age when the tradition of performing Western music of past generations was in any case barely beyond its infancy but, even then, the very fact that researches have more recently encouraged this has itself raised many questions and uncertainties. Whichever way you look at it, instrument manufacture and design, playing techniques and the rest have developed immensely over decades since the 1840s - as have the ways in which and the means whereby we listen to music - whereas the scores themselves remain more or less intact. As Robert Simpson once said, we cannot listen to the music of J S Bach as his contemporaries did becuase we have listened to Xenakis (and I don't imagine that Simpson referred to Xenakis very often!).
More importantly even than this in the present context, however, is the following.
Firstly, it was a fact at that time and remains one today that conventional musical notation is only ever a guide to, rather than a precise blueprint for, the composer's intentions; yes, some composers prescriptions are more detailed than others (compare, for example, the plethora of precise performance directions in Schönberg's Op. 25 Suite for piano or Grainger's
Country Gardens with the almost frightening absence of them in mature Sorabji scores), but the point remains well made.
Secondly, the composer's intentions are rarely if ever inflexible and, if they were, no composer would ever revise anything.
Thirdly, some composers have testified to ways in which performers, merely by playing their work, have even encouraged their desire to make revisions.
Fourthly, when composers make more than one "version" of one of their own works, the sense of the "definitive" loosens thereby; consider, for example, Busoni's Fantasia Contrappuntistica, the material for which appears to greater or lesser degree in several works under his name (and I'm referring here only to versions in the composer's hand, not arrangements by anyone else), yet even in designating one of them for piano solo as "edizione definitiva" he did not exclude - still less seek to discourage - performance of any of the others.
Fifthly, no two live performances of any work - even by its composer - will or even could (still less should!) be identical; this fact raises the spectre that repeated encounters with recorded performances of works composed before recording technology existed have enabled listening to "identical performances" whose very possibility the composer could never in any case have envisaged or perhaps even contemplated.
Sixthly, mere differences in performance acoustic can make for what might strike the listener as differences in interpretation.
Lastly, whilst certain interpretations can seem to be and indeed sometimes are less than acceptable, no two listeners in any case will derive, or even expect to derive, the very same from a particular work with each listening.
Speaking as a composer myself, the notion that every aspect of the performance of a work even could, let alone should, somehow be set in stone is as repellent in theory as it is improbable in practice; furthermore, the performers are the intermediaries between the composer and the listener, but all three categories are compsed of humans! For both of these reasons and indeed others, there can thus be no possibility that the act of interpretation itself can qualify as "inadmissible", otherwise it would be necessary to cease to listen to the performance of music altogether.
