Letters of Franz Liszt, vol 2, From Rome to the End

He was also a superlative musical critic, knowing, with few mistakes, what music of his day was "artistic" and what was not. But, although he was clearly a musical genius, he insisted on projecting a tonal, romantic "beauty" in his music, confining his music to a narrow range of moral values and ideals. He would have rejected 20th-century music that entertained cynical notions of any kind, or notions that obviated the concept of beauty in any way. There is little of a Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Cage, Adams, and certainly none of a Schoenberg, in Liszt's music. His music has an ideological "ceiling," and that ceiling is "beauty." It never goes beyond that. And perhaps it was never as "beautiful" as the music of Mo