Selected Letters.(Review)

Selected Letters. By Franz Liszt. Translated and edited by Adrian Williams. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. [xxxix, 1063 p. ISBN 0-19-816688-5. $125.]

Of the thousands of letters written by Franz Liszt, Charles Suttoni has estimated that approximately 6,600 are extant today (Suttoni, "Liszt's Writings and Correspondence," in The Liszt Companion, ed. Ben Arnold [Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, forthcoming]). Adrian Williams has translated and edited a sampling of this outpouring from thirty sources, amounting to 946 letters and over one thousand pages. He arranges the letters chronologically and provides a brief summary of important events in Liszt's life for each year between 1832 and 1886, the year of the composer's death. Some longer letters are shortened because of space constraints and "the very natural fact that some passages ... are of less interest to posterity than others" (p. xi).

The editor also provides clear sources and page numbers for each letter, notes whether his source was French or German, and gives the reader a general index and an index to Liszt's works. The bibliography is brief, but Williams has included a section of substantial biographical sketches of more than one hundred individuals acquainted with the composer. The volume is enhanced with twenty-three black-and-white illustrations of Liszt and his friends and family. The letters, combined with Williams's earlier book Portrait of Liszt: By Himself and His Contemporaries (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), are a significant contribution to source studies in Liszt research.

In his preface, Williams provides a brief overview of Liszt's letters previously available in English translation, included selectively in the present volume. He omits, for example, letters written to Princess Marie von Sayn-Wittgenstein (The Letters of Franz Liszt to Marie zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, ed. H. E. Hugo [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953]) and Baroness von Meyendorff (The Letters of Franz Liszt to Olga von Meyendorff, 1871-1886, ed. E. N. Waters, trans. W. R. Tyler [Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1979]), but he includes nearly 50 of the 559 letters Constance Bache translated from La Mara's German edition (Letters of Franz Liszt, ed. La Mara, trans. Constance Bache, 2 vols. [1894; reprint, New York: Greenwood Press, 1969]). Furthermore, he includes 21 out of the more than 100 letters Liszt wrote to Richard Wagner, many of which had been previously translated into English. Williams does not explain his selection criteria for these or, indeed, for any of the letters in the book. Does his selection constitute, for instance, the 15 percent of Liszt's output (not counting the letters edited by Waters and Hugo) that is, in his opinion, most significant for Liszt research? More details on the selection process would have been helpful.

Williams's gleaning from some English volumes and not others creates an inconsistency that is one of the major problems of this extremely important collection. Clearly, it is a daunting task to decide how to select from Liszt's letters to form a manageable, one-volume whole, but Williams's omissions result in a picture that is at times alarmingly incomplete. An example is the selection of letters to Anton Rubinstein. Williams includes only two letters to the Russian pianist, from 21 February 1855 and 21 July 1871, neither of which is in the Bache edition; yet he omits other, previously translated letters to Rubinstein that provide a more accurate assessment of Liszt's relationship to him between 1854 and 1859.

Also in the present volume are five of Liszt's letters to Robert Schumann written between 1838 and 1852, as well as one to Clara Schumann from 11 September 1852 in which he graciously laments her not allowing him to keep the autograph score of Robert's Manfred, which he had conducted in Weimar. Although Williams includes most of the Schumann-Liszt correspondence previously translated in the Bache edition, he omits a letter to Clara Wieck from 25 December 1839 and one to Robert from 27 March 1840 that would have provided additional information on Liszt's relationship with the Schumanns.

Williams's selection of the letters to Wagner is well considered, and he provides useful notes explaining Liszt's 1859 break in his relationship to Wagner after he received a letter from the latter demanding money and became irate with Wagner's petulance and greed. Liszt's relationships with other composers are more difficult to trace from this collection; Williams has included only one or two letters to individual composers, among them Fryderyk Chopin, Edvard Grieg, Bedrich Smetana, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, Rubinstein, Alexander Borodin, Mily Alexeyevich Balakirev, Cesar Cui, Carl Reinecke, Camille Saint-Saens, and Ferenc Erkel. With no explanation, he excludes important letters to Hector Berlioz, Cesar Franck, Robert Franz, Heinrich Dorn, Saint-Saens, and Gioachino Rossini.