PIANO MUSIC - Abeille Musique

T
HE PROWESS OF THE YOUNG LISZT as an infant
prodigy at the keyboard might have overshadowed
his talents as a composer had he not received a
number of commissions from sources who may have had
no inkling that the boy could actually compose at all. The
best known and earliest surviving of these pieces resulted
from Diabelli’s request to many of the luminaries of the
day each to compose a variation upon a Waltz by Diabelli
himself 1. Beethoven’s response—his last great piano
work, in the form of 33 variations on the supplied theme—
is a landmark in the literature of Western music. The
remaining crowd of composers produced something of a
curiosity, but certainly Schubert’s variation, for example, is
well worth hearing. Young Liszt takes the harmonic basis
of the theme and turns it into a daring piece of
pyrotechnics, changing both the time signature (from to
) and the key (from C major to C minor) in the process.
The little Waltz in A major 2 was published in 1825
but had been written in some form by early 1823 because
it was used that year in a ballet, Die Amazonen, cobbled
together from a variety of sources by von Gallenberg. It was
printed in England in 1832 in the version for piano, but
the earlier edition contained various alternative
instrumentations. In any event, the tiny piece is really just
an album leaf.
A copyist’s MS of the Méhul Variations 3, annotated
as being a work ‘par le jeune Liszt’, was published in good
faith by the Neue Liszt-Ausgabe in 1990 and recorded in
similar faith for the present series. It has since been
established that the attribution is false and that the work is
from the pen of Mozart’s son Franz Xaver, and was
published as his opus 23 in 1820. But since the work
remains unknown and unrecorded, like the vast majority
of F X Mozart’s output, and since the writing is not vastly
different from some of the other pieces in this collection,
it was thought best not to discard it.
2
Liszt’s early opus numbers have perplexed many
scholars, and Liszt himself seems to have become
dissatisfied with them quite soon. Briefly, the numbers on
the present recordings are his first set, inexplicably
missing the number five (although it might have been
intended for the opera Don Sanche, if chronology is to be
trusted). Confusingly, the Etudes were also published as an
Opus 1. Then Liszt began a second set of numbers, happily
including transcriptions and fantasies along with original
works, but only reaching Opus 13. Thereafter, he managed
without opus numbers, and forbade an early attempt by an
eager disciple to make an orderly enumerated list of his
compositions.
The Opus 1 Variations 4 show a clever young hand at
work, especially in the ease of the modulation at the coda
from A flat major to E major—a key-shift which would
dominate much of his mature work. Written no doubt for
his own use and dedicated to the piano-craftsman
Sébastien Erard, the work is also of interest because the
theme turns up in the so-called Third Concerto, more
about which anon.
The Opus 2 Variations 5 take a theme from Rossini’s
Ermione, the aria ‘Ah come nascondere la fiamma’, and
treat it in the brilliant salon style of the day. Liszt’s
personality has not really emerged, but his flexibility in
piano writing and the neatness of his formal grasp make it
an attractive enough showpiece.
The Opus 3 Impromptu brillant 6 is similarly
intended for light entertainment, and the formal structure
is perforce rather haphazard since so much external
material is employed. La donna del lago and Armida by
Rossini provide the themes for the first part of the work,
the middle section utilises Spontini’s Olympie and
Fernand Cortez, and the Rossini themes return in a sort
of recapitulation. However, to Lisztians, the most striking
thing about the piece is Liszt’s original introduction, which