Ep.37: Franz Liszt Never Understood Chopin’s Music?

30% off of Chopin’s Piano works vol.1 - you’ll get the code at the end of the podcast!https://www.authenticsound.org/chopin-pianoworks-vol1Did Franz Liszt really preserve Chopin’s musical tradition, or did that tradition already begin to shift within a single generation?In this episode of the Authentic Sound Podcast, we take a close look at Arthur Friedheim’s 1916 edition of Chopin’s Études. Friedheim was not just any editor: he had studied with Anton Rubinstein and Franz Liszt, and later became Liszt’s secretary. That gave him enormous authority when speaking about the so-called Chopin tradition.But there is a problem.In the introduction to his edition, Friedheim sharply criticises Karl Mikuli’s Chopin edition, dismissing its fingerings, expression marks, pedal markings, and especially its metronome marks. Yet Mikuli was one of Chopin’s most important pupils, and his edition remains remarkably close to Chopin’s own early editions. In other words, when Friedheim attacks Mikuli, he may also be attacking Chopin’s own evidence without realising it.This raises a much larger question: what do we really mean when we speak about “tradition”? Is it a faithful preservation of the composer’s intentions, or an evolving performance practice that gradually replaces the original source while still claiming its authority?Together with Stefan, I discuss Friedheim’s claims, his appeal to Liszt and Rubinstein, the problem of Chopin’s metronome marks, and why this source is so important for understanding the break between nineteenth-century performance practice and the modern idea of authenticity.At the end of the episode, we also share Chopin’s Étude Op. 10 No. 1 in a Whole Beat reading, following Chopin’s tempo indication rather than Friedheim’s later revision. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wimwinters.substack.com/subscribe