Franz Liszt - Soirées de Vienne - Farnadi

Franz Liszt (1811-1886)

Soirées de Vienne

Edith Farnadi, Piano

(Westminster, 1956)

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"John Fahey is the original underground musician. Dylan was still at Hibbing High School when John Fahey made his first record [in 1959 ... but there were 78 rpm recordings before this]." - Barry Hansen

Here's Franz Liszt semi-masquerading as the then-late Franz Schubert - just like John Fahey semi-masqueraded as the then-late Charlie Patton (among others) almost 150 years later. In both cases, you can't even think about doing such a thing without adopting a Romantic stance and attitude. Liszt - as we all know - had little problem being or appearing Romantic. The Zeitgeist (which doesn't mean that everyone went with it) lent a certain amount of support to Romanticism since Romantic ideals were "in the air" so to speak, and shared across disciplinary boundaries (such as painting, music, philosophy, poetry and even science). Therefore, Liszt didn't have to worry about "sounding like Schubert" while remaining the one and only Franz Liszt in the eyes of everyone. In Fahey's time, however - an essentially anti-Romantic time period (as it more or less still is - unless one can make a whole lot of money doing whatever one does - in which case it becomes something else anyway) - it was sort of Verboten to do anything remotely approaching the Romantic perspective of Franz Liszt or any of his Romantic contemporaries ... or heaven forbid even risk the appearance of being in the company of a bunch of warm-blooded squares (you know, which might remind someone of the unfashionable "likes" of your parents or some other authority figures belonging to "The System") ... because everything had to be cool. This set of prohibitions / unwritten laws, even though it occasionally changes clothes and names, at times looking just like its opposite, was - and is - enforced with all the rigour of The Law of Nature, a decision from the U.S. Supreme Court, Dick Clark's "American Bandstand", and what have you. This is OK (I guess) when all you want is to fit in with your crowd and have someone who will consider you safe enough to talk to - but all this gets in the way of fitting into a LARGER picture of art in general - which any artist "worth their salt" puts before all else, including social / cultural taboos; a picture where things like artistic tradition have not always been 100% dictated by throwing the entire history of human art (except, of course, minus one's very own cool part of it) into the trash pile. So - what do you do when you're a Romantic in an anti-Romantic time? You go underground - just like John Fahey did (and a few others who I won't name because some of them are still underground ... and because I like preserving as much Romantic mystery as there remains).
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New LP transfers of above material.
Includes cover, label, notes, etc.