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What kind of piano should one choose to play Liszt? An
instrument of his time, or of Messiaen’s?
One thatwill allowyoutotell astory. Liszt’spianomusic isnaturally
beautiful, generous as the composer himself was. I would go so
far as to say that it’s music without any ‘malice’ in the writing (as
there sometimes in the music of Prokofiev, for example), and in
that respect Olivier Messiaen is his peer: I would placeMessiaen in
a direct line of descent from Liszt.
Nothing could be further from any kind of deliberately acrobatic,
perilous, petty difficulty than the music written by these two
composers for whom the piano was so important. Their natures,
their love and their generosity produced their musical signature –
its energy, its erudition, its virtuosity – even if Messiaen, the man
of faith and of the supernatural, is an eternal contemplative, and
Liszt, filled with faith, is a man, eternally.