PIANO MUSIC - Abeille Musique

L
ISZT’s staunch friendship and support for Berlioz
was reflected in many practical ways—from his
piano transcription of the Symphonie fantastique
in 1834 to the Berlioz week in Weimar in 1855, in
several smaller transcriptions and the arrangements of
Harold en Italie, and in reviews and articles, especially
the lengthy document Berlioz und seine ‘Harold-
Symphonie’, Liszt tried to popularize Berlioz’s works,
which were widely held to be bizarre and intractable.
From their first encounter in 1830, the two men had
seen eye to eye on most matters musical, aesthetic and
religious, and Berlioz expressed himself very content with
the fate of his music in Liszt’s hands, whether playing,
transcribing or conducting.
The only mystery which surrounds Liszt’s transcription
of Harold in Italy is why, having produced it so
promptly, he took so long to publish it. As with the
Symphonie fantastique, it is also clear that Liszt’s version
was made before Berlioz effected some slight alterations
in the score prior to publication—as so often with
Berlioz, there was a considerable delay between composition
and performance and the appearance of the
printed work, and Liszt’s version preserves the original
text. Thus the viola is heard in several notes just before
the final chorale in the Pilgrims’ March which no longer
feature in the score, and Liszt has allowed the viola to
participate in the Allegro assai sections of the Serenade
with double-stopped chords in imitation of a piper’s
drone. However, Berlioz’s brilliant second thought of foreshortening
the repeated chords by half a bar at a time in
the peroration of the first movement (four occasions) has
been adopted in this performance in accordance with his
published score.
Although Liszt’s partition could scarcely be called
chamber music, it is undeniable that, without Berlioz’s
orchestration, the viola part is heard to much greater
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advantage than is usually the case, and from time to time
a real chamber music texture emerges, leaving one to
regret that Liszt expressed himself relatively little in the
medium, and then usually in transcription. Liszt seems to
have thought of the piece as a piano transcription of the
same stamp as that of the Symphonie fantastique, and
the demands upon the pianist are similarly acute. (Liszt
did make a solo piano version of the second movement of
Harold, which is recorded in this series on Volume 5.) At
any rate, Paganini, who declined to play Berlioz’s original
because he felt that the viola had too little to do, might
have felt less oppressed by Liszt’s version, at least in the
first three movements. And, as with the Symphonie
fantastique, Liszt is fully in tune with Berlioz’s ideas of
programme (they were both completely enamoured of
the works of Byron) and colour. Berlioz’s original is too
well known to require further description, but it will be
observed that Liszt was not tempted to alter the degree of
participation of the viola in the final movement, even
though, at the entry of the menacing trombones and
Liszt’s extravagant tremolo which covers over half the
keyboard in its attempt to recreate the violin parts of the
original, the pianist could well have used some assistance.
The inclusion of the original version of the Romance
oubliée was prompted by two considerations. It is the
only Liszt work for this combination, apart from the
Harold transcription, and the broken chords which
inform the coda to the Romance oubliée are quite clearly
an act of homage to the marvellous viola writing at the end
of the Pilgrims’ March in Harold. Indeed, the whole final
section is a later addition to the Romance oubliée, which
was a reworking of an earlier piano Romance of 1848
(which will appear in another volume of the present
series), itself derived from the song O pourquoi donc of
1843. The Romance oubliée was Liszt’s response in 1880
to a request to reprint the earlier piano piece. He prepared