LDV100

24 LISZT | ONCE UPON A TIME Don’t you think that Liszt’s amorous passion was just as important as his religious aspirations? Didn’t that pose a real dilemma for him? It was the key problem of his whole life, from the moment he became aware, as an adolescent, of his inherent nature, his duality. His Sonata, with its cyclic form, oscillates between a longing for God and a demonic tension! It’s a ‘protean work’, as Alfred Cortot put it. As with the late sonatas of Beethoven or Schubert, I don’t think that any pianist can combine, in a single performance, all the parameters of so wide-ranging a musical universe. Isn’t incompleteness consubstantial with all creative activity?