[CAUT] liszt temp

[Ed Sutton]

While I don't know Liszt's music well, it doesn't strike me as the sort of music that would display temperament colors particularly well. He is especially interested in big sonorities that tend to overwhelm subtle colorations in close mid-range intervals. I'm sure he heard many kinds of tunings in his travels and long life, including lots of ET and reasonably close attempts at ET. Perhaps someone who knows his music well can correct my opinion.

Ed Sutton
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Fred Sturm 
  To: caut at ptg.org 
  Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2010 5:01 PM
  Subject: Re: [CAUT] liszt temp


  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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