Liszt-o-mania

Pianist Laura Kargul interprets the genius

by Doug Hubley

Laura Kargul performs at the Corthell Concert Hall Friday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m.

LISZT INTERPRETER:Laura Kargul

Pianist Laura Kargul returns to Corthell Concert Hall in Gorham this weekend with a program that looks like a puzzle. There’s lots of vocal music, but no singer will perform. And one composer is prominent in Kargul’s Friday and Sunday concerts, but none of the music began with him.

The key to these paradoxes is the composer: Franz Liszt, the Hungarian musical genius who invented rock stardom a century before Elvis was born. Lisztomania, sad to say, overshadows the more meaningful aspects of Liszt’s legacy, and one of those is the massive amount of music — some 250 works — he adapted for piano from other musical formats and other composers.

Kargul, known as a Liszt interpreter, is devoting half of this weekend’s program to vocal works that Liszt either transcribed, in the case of songs by Beethoven and Schubert, keeping the original structure largely intact; or paraphrased, in the case of Verdi’s opera Rigoletto, which Liszt reduced to a show-stopping six and a half minutes.

Now 43 and a Freeport resident, Kargul was raised in Michigan, started piano at age 6 and made a big splash with her 1985 European debut, in the Netherlands. Her performances this weekend are part of the Faculty Concert Series at the University of Southern Maine, where she has served since 1989 as an associate professor of music and director of keyboard studies. One-night stands are the norm for the series, but Kargul usually draws so well that the 3 p.m. Sunday show was added to raise funds for USM music scholarships.

In addition to the four Liszt adaptations, she’ll play three sonatas by Baroque composer Domenico Scarlatti and a Robert Schumann piece considered one of the 19th century’s greatest large-scale works for piano. In fact, Schumann’s Fantasie in C Major, Op. 17, is part of a historic thread that stitches together the program’s first half.

Kargul opens with Liszt’s 1849 transcription of a Beethoven masterpiece, An die ferne Geliebte (“To the distant beloved”). Written in 1816, these six poems set to music constituted the first song cycle in Western music. Next comes Schumann’s 1838 Fantasie, whose Beethoven and Liszt connections include an especially juicy story involving the burning romance between one Clara Wieck and the penniless Schumann.

Wieck’s father, Kargul says, “didn’t want Schumann anywhere near his daughter. He was afraid they were going to end up getting married, and he didn’t feel that Schumann would be a fit husband for his concert-pianist daughter.” In the end they did and Schumann wasn’t, but in the meantime Papa Wieck kept the lovebirds apart. Hence the Fantasie, Schumann’s longing love note to his own distant beloved — written with Ludwig’s help, albeit unwitting, since he had died some years earlier. Schumann borrowed freely from An die ferne Geliebte, culminating in a climactic direct quote at the end of the first movement.

The program’s second half opens with sonatas by Scarlatti — three from the 550 or so that this Italian composer penned from 1738 to 1757. Then it’s more Liszt adaptations, transcriptions of two songs by Schubert, and a paraphrase of Verdi’s Rigoletto.

Liszt was a transcribing phenomenon, prodigious in quality and quantity. (Just for perspective, a recently completed collection of piano music that Liszt wrote or adapted totals 95 CDs.) His adaptations include all nine Beethoven symphonies, countless songs and some 50 operatic adaptations, from Mozart to Wagner.

Moreover, Liszt was timely, active at the same time the piano was blossoming as a musical and a social force. The piano was uniquely able to represent, if not imitate, nearly every other musical sound, from folk fiddling to a Verdi opera. Hence a flood of transcriptions. Factor in mass production that put pianos where they’d never been, in middle-class homes, saloons, boarding houses, and hotel lobbies. Suddenly more people were hearing more kinds of music than ever. (In his intriguing history Piano Roles: Three Hundred Years of Life with the Piano, published last spring, Bates College professor James Parakilas says much more about piano and today’s musical-industrial complex.)

Liszt is one of the few composers whose piano adaptations have survived. That’s because he wasn’t just translating music into “pianese” by rote; instead, he treated others’ concepts as a launch pad for his ideas, which were largely driven by his astonishing technical ability. “It’s clear that he was exploring, developing, and growing as a composer for the piano through writing transcriptions,” Kargul says.

At the same time, Liszt’s feel for the source material usually drove him to keep faith with the original intent. He had “very good taste — and that’s almost like an oxymoron when you’re talking about Liszt. But I do believe it,” Kargul laughs. “He knew when he could mess with it and he knew when he couldn’t.”

Therefore some Liszt transcriptions, like the Beethoven and Schubert songs on Kargul’s program, afford a good starting place for Liszt if his showboat reputation makes you leery. The Beethoven, in particular, is remarkably spare, pristine and true to the original. The Rigoletto paraphrase, on the other hand, is the Liszt of Lisztomania, glittery with the flights of technique that left 19th-century gentlemen stunned and their ladies swooning.

But even the Beethoven and Schubert arrangements are much harder to play than they sound, Kargul points out. For her, the effort is rewarded with an emotional payoff more immediate than, say, what a Bach fugue might evoke. “I enjoy seeing a pianist sweat,” she says, figuring that most of the rest of us do too. “And I think this music is worth sweating over.

Doug Hubley can be reached at doug.hubley@worldnet.att.net..