PIANO MUSIC - Abeille Musique

Concerto No 1), and a copyist’s score is held in Weimar.
The piano part is not actually completed. Letting
Mr Rosenblatt illuminate us:
For the first draft, Liszt wrote out a piano score on two
staves with plenty of blank space above and below for
revisions. The next stage was an orchestral score
without a piano part, and the piano score from the
first stage was modified such that it served as the
missing piano part to the orchestral score. For
substantial revisions, Liszt cancelled the passage in
both scores, and wrote out separate pages with all
parts, piano and orchestra. The manuscripts were
then given to a copyist, who integrated them and
returned a fair copy to Liszt for final corrections,
revisions, and the addition of articulation and
dynamic markings. This procedure can be seen in the
various surviving scores for the first and second piano
concertos.
(Clearly, then, this explains the many scores of much of
Liszt’s concertante and orchestral œuvre found in
copyists’ hands, and gives the lie to the notion that Raff,
Conradi, or any other amanuensis, was in any way
responsible for Liszt’s orchestration.) In 1836 Liszt asked
his mother to send him copies of some of his earliest
published compositions: two sets of Variations, the
Allegro & Rondo di bravura and the early set of Études
(Opp 1, 2, 4 and 6—all of which are recorded in Volume
26). These last became the basis of the Douze Grandes
études, and three of the other works provided material for
the present concerto. Liszt spoke of having three concertos
ready at the end of 1839. Two are those we know well,
although not nearly in their final form, the other is this
concerto, which Liszt never revised for publication and
performance. There remain passages where the original
short score piano part has been crossed out, or where it
does not fit the final orchestral score, or where it is left
10
doubling the orchestra, and a discreet amount of
reorganizing of the texture seemed necessary to the
present writer (whose article on the subject and facsimile
of all the suggested text can be consulted in the Liszt
Society Journal, 1993) in order to extract a suitable piano
part from its orchestral surroundings.
The concerto is in a form dear to Liszt: a concert
Allegro with interpolated slow movement and a coda in the
character of a scherzo, with many recitative-like musings
at the structural divisions. The opening presents the
principal theme—derived from the Allegro di bravura,
but in the guise of an introduction with cadenzas 5. The
reappearance of the orchestra indicates the movement
proper, and a triplet motif borrowed from the Rondo di
bravura 6 leads to the full statement of the principal
theme in E flat minor (and despite the variety of key
signatures, this concerto really is in E flat minor rather
than major). The music makes its way to D major and a
martial second theme which never reappears, and thence
to a development section which breaks off with a short
cadenza and leads to the slow movement in G flat
major 7, whose theme is adapted from the one which
Liszt had first composed for his Opus 1 Variations. The
development resumes in F sharp minor 8 and the
shortened recapitulation of the first theme follows. The
coda, finally in E flat major, is a scherzando transformation
of the first theme with interpolated references to the
slow movement 9.
The Grand Solo de concert has already been
recorded in its original unpublished version for solo piano
(in Volume 51). As is very well known, the piece was
extended in about 1850 by Liszt with the interpolation of a
slow movement, and issued as Grosses Konzertsolo, and
later rearranged for two pianos as Concerto pathétique
(for further details see Vol 53b), but the present
concertante version has remained in obscurity. It is clear