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Franz Liszt and his World.

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Franz Liszt and his World. Edited by Dana Gooley and Christopher Gibbs. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. [xx, 587 p. ISBN 0-691-12902-9. $24.95.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index.



"I don't really know what a Gorgon is like, but I am quite sure that Lady Bracknell is one. In any case, she is a monster, without being a myth, which is rather unfair ..." (Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, act 1)

With this latest volume from the Bard Music Festival series, an empirically plural Liszt is finally in a position to slay the more familiar, anecdotally mythic "Liszt." Were the pianist-composer still a Merlin without being a myth--adapting Jack's bon mot about Lady Bracknell--it would not only be "rather unfair," but a distortion out of sync with twenty-first century criticism. Of course, constructions of Liszt's identity, whether "plural and boundary-crossing" (p. xvii) or frustrated monoliths "condense[d into] a unified, embracing image" (p. xv) remain constructions all the same. What differentiates this volume from similar such studies is the extraordinary wealth of source data brought to bear--an approach that some might construe as narrowly positivistic--and the perspective from which it seeks to interrogate, a broader historico-critical perspective (we are told in the preface) that illuminates Liszt "without isolating him in the spotlight." (p. xvii) With a revisionist prerogative, Leon Botstein's concluding contribution, for example, tacitly unseats singular biography by considering Liszt an "ideal prism through which to reconsider the character of [the nineteenth] century" (p. 518). Historiography, music printing, the public concert, and the press are all under scrutiny then. Liszt is (or perhaps merely focuses) the lens.

On the crest of this new perspective, Dana Gooley and Christopher Gibbs' corrective riposte to studies tinged with hagiography is a mixture of near-obsessive empiricism and cautious assessment. Split into four sections, the central two parts of this book ("Biographical Documents" and "Criticism and Reception") present 200 pages of valuable source material with detailed critical commentaries as a platform for further study (some newly translated, some printed for the first time); the outer two portions ("Essays"...

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