Hardly any other performing artist can match Alfred Brendel for expertise when it comes to Franz Liszt. And so on 21 November he will launch the Piano Festival with a keynote speech in honor of this “absolute virtuoso” before his colleague Yefim Bronfman brings his music to life at the keyboard. It’s thanks to Brendel in particular that Liszt’s enigmatic late works finally found a place in the repertoire after nearly a century of neglect. The pianist gives us a taste of why these pieces are so close to his heart.

“Hardly any other composer underwent such a long musical journey, from brilliantly talented prodigy to the virtuoso years and then the mastery of his Weimar period and, finally, the bitterness of his last decade. Liszt’s late piano pieces are a discovery of our time. Scholars had already realized that the Mephistophelian Abbé was one of the fathers of 20th-century music. But there was a delay of almost 100 years before we discovered that these pieces could not only be studied but also played in a way that communicates with the public.
To be sure, these works are no longer determined by the context of the 19th century, with all its pomp and virtuoso display. They are no longer trying to convince and persuade. “Music for the infirmary,” is what Liszt sarcastically calls the pieces that now become his main compositions. In the last fifteen years of his life he was haunted by dances of death and Mephistophelian waltzes, elegies and threnodies, memorials and images of derangement. Liszt’s late pieces seem to me to anticipate something of what happened in the visual arts in Europe at the turn of the century: the discovery of the primitive and the barbaric.”