PIANO MUSIC - Abeille Musique

from the manuscripts—one for solo piano with
instructions to Raff for preparing the composite score
(which does not seem to exist), and the other for
orchestra, but without the solo part (containing some
instructions for the adaptation of the extant piano part to
fit the orchestral version)—that Liszt was proceeding in
his customary manner until he had second thoughts
about the overall shape of the piece. The orchestral
manuscript was kindly copied to the present writer by its
current owner, the Marquess of Londonderry, who had
previously copied it to Humphrey Searle. Unfortunately
Searle was unaware of the original piano piece and tried to
put together some kind of compromise version using the
published Grosses Konzertsolo, adding orchestration of
his own, and omitting all passages in the original score
which did not square with the published solo (which
version was performed several times for the BBC), and,
with all due respect to a pioneer, sadly making a large
number of deliberate alterations and accidental misreadings
the while. (Searle refers to the orchestral manuscript
as showing ‘all the hallmarks of an inexperienced
orchestrator’. It does show many signs of haste, especially
in the transpositions of the four horn parts, two in E, two
in C, but requires no touching up, as the listener is invited
to agree. In any case, Searle was quite unaware of the
many earlier examples of Liszt’s original orchestration,
and credits other hands with much work which is
indubitably Liszt’s or at the very least prepared under his
minute instruction—in the manner so ably described
above by Mr Rosenblatt.) The score has been prepared
anew for this performance and for publication using all
available manuscript sources.
The Grand Solo takes the familiar form of a concert
Allegro and the opening gesture generates much of the
binding material for the work bl. In the traditional way,
E minor proceeds through a modulatory transition to give
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way to G major for the second subject bm, and this leads
into a passage of troubled repose where elements of both
themes appear (unfortunately this excellent passage
disappears in the later versions of the work). The
transition material begins the recapitulation bn, but is
interrupted by the orchestral stretta which does duty for
the return of the first theme. The second theme returns as
a funeral march bo and grows in confidence to form a
triumphal coda.
Bellini’s Suoni la tromba from I Puritani provided the
basis for the famous Hexaméron variations, a work
essentially prepared by Liszt after he had collated the
contributions of five other composers each commissioned
to write a variation for a collection to raise money for the
poor at a Paris concert of 1837 organized by the Princess
Belgiojoso. The work was not completed in time, but Liszt
eventually produced a work of much originality—despite
the ‘foreign’ contributions—using a theme of his own,
heard at the outset, in conjunction with fragments of
Bellini’s theme in all of the sections outside the actual
variations, and referring to the several variations in turn in
the finale. He published the piece with indications for the
participation of the orchestra in all the sections under his
personal control: the introduction and theme, the
ritornello, the interludes and the finale. We know that Liszt
performed the work with orchestra, but the only authentic
score—unpublished, and full of copyist’s misinterpretations—contains
only part of the work: the introduction,
theme, variation 1, variation 2, variation 4 (over which the
copyist has tried to write the solo part of variation 3, but
has given up at the point where it no longer fits, after
which the solo part is entirely absent from the score), the
first nineteen bars of variation 3 which then leaps to the
parallel passage at bar 76 of the finale—designated in the
tracking as ‘Finale (part 2)’—continuing to the end.
It seems unlikely that this score was the basis for any