[CAUT] liszt temp

Fred Sturm fssturm at unm.edu
Sun Jan 24 15:01:38 MST 2010


On Jan 24, 2010, at 1:55 PM, G Cousins wrote:

> Does anyone have an insight as to the temperament that Franz Liszt  
> might have been using for his piano works?
> Nothing yet found in my research. I'm thinking some sort of pre- 
> modern ET.  Thanks in advance,
> Gerry C

I would say definitely ET. By the time he was first writing in Paris,  
the work of Claude Montal had pretty well established a very refined  
method of achieving ET, which had long been established as the norm in  
Germany, where refined methods were also available. That would already  
apply to his earliest works, and ET continued to become even more  
prevalent later. This is not to say that one can't speculate about the  
existence of variant methods during this time (and about degrees of  
accuracy and skill), but the overwhelming evidence for this time  
period (about 1830-1885), outside Italy and England, is in favor of  
virtually universal acceptance of ET - and of methods that allowed  
aural tuners to achieve it with considerable accuracy.
	Liszt was a prolific writer. Perhaps somewhere in his output of  
letters there is some bit of information about his predilections  
regarding tuning, but I don't think so. Otherwise, surely somebody  
would have trotted it out as an exhibit A. In fact, surprisingly  
enough, very few composers expressed opinions on temperament.
Regards,
Fred Sturm
University of New Mexico
fssturm at unm.edu




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