Guest Blogger Franz Liszt

In his article On the Situation of Artists, a 23-year-old Franz Liszt suggests that the French Govornment advance an eight-pronged approach to music. According to the soon-to-be-great composer, they ought to:

1) Hold a competition every five years for works in the major musical genres
2) Have music education in the schools, and "religious" (moral and civic-spirited) songs composed for children to sing
3) Have a reform of church music
4) Have state-sponsored festivals of symphonic music
5) Actively encourage recitals, opera, and chamber music
6) Create a new and different music school, with branches in the provinces
7) Teach courses in music history and aesthetics at that school, or those schools
8) Create inexpensive editions of the greatest musical works of the past and present, and scholarly studies and dissertations that explore and explain them

I coudn't agree more!

In that same article, Liszt says:

"Schiller said somewhere: 'Every time art has lost its way, it has been the artists who were at fault.' Might we not add: Every time artists--rather than uniting, either to resist oppressive conditions and harsh demands, or to walk arm in arm toward the goal that has been divinely assigend to them--break ranks, repress their awareness of their own dignity, adn submit, one by one, day by day, to the consequences of silently accepting their inferior position, the fault is certainly theirs to a great extent."

(All this by way of a program essay by Ralph P. Locke from Franz Liszt and His World)