Poetic Music for the Theatre and the Concert Hall: Where the Creative Paths of Wagner and Liszt Diverge

Abstract

Were Liszt and Wagner as composers and musical thinkers more similar or different? The differences are obvious: Liszt, the piano virtuoso who did not write a single opera in his mature years, was flying in the face of Wagner’s belief in the unification of all the arts in the opera — or better still, the music drama. Yet they were together the leading avant-gardists of the day, two pillars supporting the temple of the New Germans; and not without reason, for their respective prose works reveal some strikingly similar thoughts on art and music. The aim of this paper is to focus into this paradox in order to demonstrate that it is in fact not so much of a paradox: that their differences are deeply rooted in their similarities, and that their creative paths separated as a result of similar thought processes rather than differing ones. Once we begin to look beyond the conspicuous differences, such as their conflicting attitudes towards the concept of drama and their respective choices of genre and subject matter, what becomes apparent is a series of parallels between their separate paths, allowing us to view the two as artists who were working on remarkably close wavelengths.