With the Liszt and Godowsky examples, it's of course (usually) infinitely preferable if that sense of struggle is not communicated in the performance - hence my highlighting of Ian's crucial comment concerning Richter and Feux Follets.
Can't say I agree with this. For me, the interest in Liszt (and it is considerable, sometimes) is precisely in how the virtuosic elements contradict the canonically "musical" ones (Ian's reference to the repeated chords in
Vallée d'Obermann is a perfect example, and I'd certainly rather hear them tearing a fabric rather than merely prolonging a continuity), and in performances where the knuckle-breaking figuration is too easily conquered I rapidly lose interest. Not to say that the music should only be played by those without the technical means to play it smoothly, of course - merely that I will, in general, prefer interpretive stances that make the fundamental conflict between the two ontologically distinct strands of "material" in Liszt (and Alkan, also a composer in whom I am very interested) clear, rather than automatically subsuming the one to the other.
It's a fair assumption, of course, that Liszt wrote these pieces with the goal of simultaneously presenting and conquering previously unconquerable technical challenges, and that his ideal (and I have no idea whether he was generally considered to have achieved it) was the "smoother" approach; but that's neither here nor there. And, again, it's not that I don't want to hear the challenges conquered; it's that I want the residue of the process of conquering them to be audible, and made structurally significant.
I think what you are identifying, Evan, is as much a musical issue as a technical issue, though the two are not really entirely separable. If Liszt started to find something too easy, he would find a way of making it more difficult so he wouldn't get bored (hence why Mendelssohn said that it was fine when Liszt played something for the first time; after that he would end up doubling lines in thirds, sixths, octaves, etc.). In a similar way, if things start getting too smooth, players like Horowitz or Cziffra find some way to raise the stakes; suddenly lifting the pedal during daredevil figurations so as to make the sound more brittle and exposed (can be extremely exciting), having sudden surges of dynamics, pushing the tempo forward to near-breaking point, and so on. Horowitz does that in the last section of
Vallée d'Obermann, so as to keep the music 'on the edge'. It's a matter of the particular pianst deliberately pushing themselves to the extremes so as to create tension in such a manner. Listen to Cziffra's amazing performances of Liszt's transcription of the Polonaise from Tchaikovsky's
Eugene Onegin, in particular a passage in rapid demisemiquavers/thirty-second notes, with almost no pedal at all, and spectacular evenness and clarity. Others would use a moderate amount of pedal, and maybe a greater differentation between the individual notes so as to make some of them sound essentially decorative. Cziffra treats this passage not simply as being about melody and harmony, but makes much of the expressive potential in the type of keyboard figuration itself (so so important in Liszt). Totally brilliant, he can most definitely do it, but the manner of execution adds that tightrope quality which generates tremendous excitement (then his utter lack of any slowing down when it comes to the double octaves that follow pushes the music even closer to the brink). This is not simply virtuosity as opposed to 'making music', the virtuosity itself (and its ostentatiousness) is an integral part of the musical experience.
