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https://doi.org/10.21857/mnlqgc020y

Liszt and Bad Taste

Richard Taruskin ; University of California at Berkeley, SAD

Sažetak

It seems that of all the great composers, Liszt is the one most frequently accused of bad taste, but that somehow these accusations have never threatened his status among the great. Charles Rosen once suggested, the accusations in some sense and to some degree actually identify Liszt’s particular position in the pantheon.
In following his main idea, the author offers a survey of historical formulations on the issues of taste, »good taste« and »bad taste« from Baroque to contemporary writings, using ideas displayed by Leopold Mozart, F. J. Haydn, Franz Liszt himself, Charles Rosen, Alfred Brendel, Marquis de Venosta, Stephen Menell, Giulio Mancini, David Hume, T.S. Eliot, Igor Stravinsky, François Raguenet, J. L. Lecerf de la Viéville, Francesco Geminiani, Voltaire, D’Alembert, Immanuel Kant, Edmund Burke, Gillo Dorfles, Reynaldo Hahn, Artur Schnabel, Theodor Billroth and some others.
The notion of taste as an absolute standard – sanctioned by consensus of the capable (»men of sentiment«) – has persisted since the eighteenth century despite the rise of less intransigent definitions. Its persistence is attributable to the conviction, among the politically conservative, that »the agreement of cultivated people about what is good and beautiful was a force for the political cohesion of the community«.
Taste as axiomatic personal preference seems a bulwark of personal autonomy, a democratic or egalitarian notion. Once we postulate that taste is not a simple idea but a compound of sensibility and knowledge, it follows that a deficiency of taste can be the result of a deficiency in either of these categories. »From a defect in [sensibility,] arises a want of taste«, which is to say an inability to render any judgment at all; whereas »a weakness in [knowledge] constitutes a wrong or a bad [taste]«.
Aesthetic snobbery is always and only social snobbery in disguise. An indirect pleasure it may be, but snobbery is a powerful pleasure; snobbery is the sole compensation we receive for the loss of immediacy and naive pleasure that our critical judgment exacts from us (Burke). It amounts to an account and critique of aspirational »good taste« which arises alongside aesthetic snobbery, the most quintessentially bourgeois of all snobberies, and might even be deemed tantamount to it.
It is not taste but »good taste« that conflates aesthetic and moral quality, and sits in judgment over them conjointly. Because it is the bastard child of snobbery, »good taste« requires the ever more exacting exercise of negative judgment. »Good taste« constructs spurious existential categories such as »kitsch«. As snobbery’s surrogate, »good taste« is not only aspirational but also competitive. It gives one an incentive to expand the range of objects one can consign to outer darkness, so as to maximize one’s »conscious pride and superiority«.
The ambiguous character of virtuosity and the ambivalent attitude towards it in Liszt’s day on the part, not of audiences, surely, but of the newly professionalized class of tastemakers— what Liszt, in exasperation, called »the aristocracy of mediocrity«. This wry phrase is identified with »an increasingly influential middle-class cultural regime that wished to be purified of virtuosic display«, an aspiration called, straightforwardly enough, virtuosophobia (Gillen D’Arcy Wood). Hence one of the paradoxes of nineteenth-century
musical reception that continues to haunt us in the twenty-first century is the simultaneous denigration of virtuosity and fetishizing of difficulty. Thus, the dexterous overcoming of difficulty destroys the sublime effect and vitiates the awe that it inspires. The English critics who wrote about Liszt in the 1840s belittled or even deplored his »transcendent« virtuosity, associating it with triviality rather than with grandeur. The very act of transcendence was virtuosity’s transgression – a transgression against the virtue of difficulty.
Of course, the Second Hungarian Rhapsody is a central work for Liszt; without it, he would not be what he is in our imaginations. But what do those who object to it find objectionable? When I hear it well played, I am amazed at the originality with which Liszt imitated the cimbalom, I marvel at the beautifully realized (and »finished«) form and pacing of the piece, and cannot see where it is deficient either in control or in dignity. The derision with which it is treated seems to be a particularly crisp instance of the anti-theatrical prejudice as applied to a composition that has become the test par excellence of a pianist’s ability to enact the role of virtuoso.
And there is more: like a gas the Second Hungarian Rhapsody has escaped its container and leeched out into the popular culture, since that is where its inspiration had come from. Many other works by nineteenth-century masters had a similar source in restaurant and recruitment music. Like Liszt’s Rhapsody, they adapted the sounds of environmental music to the special precinct of the concert hall. But unlike Liszt’s Rhapsody, they were never reabsorbed into the environment. Liszt’s Rhapsody inhabits animated cartoons, it is heard, and used, in dance halls; it was in the repertoire of every swing band. It even haunts sports arenas. It is everywhere. Is this something to condemn, something to resist? Or is this interpenetration of the artistic and the vulgar worlds an ineluctable mark, perhaps the defining mark, of Liszt’s greatness? To attempt to purge Liszt of these impolite associations is indeed to misunderstand his place in our world. To accept his invitation to flout snobbish »good taste« might help us re-assert, or recover, taste – namely, a reliable sense of what is fitting, and when.

Ključne riječi

Franz Liszt; Second Hungarian Rhapsody; taste; »good taste«; »bad taste«; virtuosity; snobbism; aesthetics

Hrčak ID:

203860

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/203860

Datum izdavanja:

17.7.2018.

Podaci na drugim jezicima: hrvatski

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