PIANO MUSIC - Abeille Musique

A
S WE REMARKED in the first supplementary volume to the Hyperion Liszt Series, there
was an understanding that new discoveries would be issued from time to time. There are
still pieces turning up at auction, and we are still looking for missing works. Research
into manuscript holdings in various libraries has also revealed that works which were first
thought to be rough sketches are in fact playable, virtually completed pieces.
The Sketchbook N5, held in the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv in Weimar, contains complete drafts
and sketches to a number of works, and the contents date from some time in 1845 to early 1847.
In her doctoral thesis on the volume, Rena Charnin-Mueller refers to it as the ‘Tasso’
Sketchbook, both for ease of identification, and because the volume contains the first draft in
short score of Liszt’s symphonic poem Tasso – Lamento e trionfo. The volume also contains the
first draft (without organ) of the C minor Mass for men’s voices. Much of the remainder is piano
music, and several works have already been in circulation, as well as published and recorded:
the Cujus animam transcription (see volume 24 of the Hyperion Liszt Series), Spirto gentil
(volume 17), the Cavatine from Robert le Diable (volume 30), and the Sketchbook begins with
an untitled work which has been recorded as Prelude, S171d (volume 47). This last piece is rerecorded
here together with the seven pieces sketched immediately after it in the N5 Sketchbook
under the generic title Liszt wrote at the beginning. These other seven pieces had been
previously overlooked because they appeared to be work in progress, and it proved difficult to
establish a definitive text until the present writer was able to devote the proper amount of time
to examine the Sketchbook personally. Many of these pieces had been published and recorded
by the pioneering Albert Brussee in the Netherlands, but the text prepared for the present
recording and future Liszt Society publication turns out to be at a wide variance from that of
the Brussee project. Liszt’s generic title is the familiar Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, but
in brackets he also suggests Préludes et Harmonies poétiques et religieuses and we have taken
that as our working title for the present set of pieces in order to avoid confusion with the single
piece of 1833–4 (see volume 7), the 1847 set of pieces (see volumes 7 and 47), several single
works intended for the project (see volumes 47 and 56) and the ‘definitive’ collection of 1853
(see volume 7).
The first piece is headed ‘Nancy 16 nov 45’. There are some signs of revision, ignored in the
present reading, but taken up in the 1847 version of the piece (as in volume 47). The musical
material is the only part of the 1845–6 series which makes its way through the 1847 set and into
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