PIANO MUSIC - Abeille Musique

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modern machine, with its ungratefully heavy repetition
mechanism. It must have been a problem even for the
instruments and performers of the 1850s, too, because all
trace of this technique is expunged from the final version.
When Liszt titled the 1851 version of the Third Study
Paysage (‘Landscape’) he altered its atmosphere to
accord with this new suggestion. It remains interesting
that the speedy juvenile effort in is already transformed
into a ‘Poco adagio’ in , but in the 1837 piece the climax
yields an impassioned page of ‘Presto agitato assai’ which
Liszt later deemed superfluous.
The Fourth Study originated without its melody in the
simple crossed-hand exercise of 1826, and is en route to
becoming the familiar Mazeppa. (A further version of this
piece, titled Mazeppa, with a new introduction and coda
and a dedication to Victor Hugo, was made in 1840. It was
intended to include this work in the present volume, and
the piece was recorded, but the restriction on the
maximum playing-time of a compact disc proved the
undoing of the plan, and the ‘extra’ Mazeppa will appear
in a future volume.) Curiously, the 1837 version of the
piece begins in a rather less complicated way than its
1851 counterpart, and plunges straight in to the principal
material, with triplet chord accompaniment. Whereas in
the final version the middle section takes the tempo down
a fraction, here Liszt asks for a slight increase, and the
whole texture is quite different. The coda, not yet having
reference to Hugo’s poem, is brisk and concise.
How Liszt transformed his pretty little 1826 piece into
the Fifth Study is a minor miracle. Of course the 1851
version, Feux-follets (‘Will-o’-the-wisps’), with its intricate
double notes, needs no introduction. (Incidentally, this
piece is often taken at far too fast a tempo in the hope that
the listener will not hear that the difficulties have been
diluted by a simplification of the inner voice in the right
hand—even in some of the most celebrated performances.
Liszt marked it ‘Egualmente’ in 1837, ‘Allegretto’ in
1851.) In the 1837 version the coda is marginally shorter,
but otherwise the structure of the piece is familiar. The
double notes and repeated chords are a good deal trickier
than in the 1851 text.
In the Sixth Study Liszt has again transformed the
whole notion of his 1826 prototype by changing the metre
from duple to triple time. Although he dropped the idea in
1851, Liszt asks for the opening statement to be played by
the left hand alone. Otherwise the piece resembles the
later Vision quite closely, excepting a brief gesture at the
reprise in double octaves and some daring harmony at the
coda which even Liszt felt obliged to tone down in the later
version.
In the thematic catalogue of his works which appeared
during his lifetime, Liszt marks with an asterisk all those
pieces which he requires to be played only in their final
versions. The 1851 Studies are a case in point. We beg
leave to differ from the master in this and in most other
instances; a great man’s judgement of his own past work
need not be uncritically revered, and besides, Liszt, in his
almost careless abandonment of all his earlier productions,
discards many pieces which never came to be
revised. In the Seventh Study of the 1837 set we have a
piece which is widely regarded to be superior to its 1851
revision: Eroica—it certainly holds together better, and
the transition material from the introduction to the main
theme (and its repetition towards the end) is altogether
more convincing than the dotted rhythms which Liszt
substituted in 1851. There is also a final variation of the
theme which was later cut, where again Liszt takes a very
avant garde harmonic position.
Liszt asks the impossible in the first bar of the Eighth
Study: 42 notes in rapid fire are asked to be held in one
pedal, and yet six melody notes in each hand are asked to
be accentuated. This can very nearly be done on a piano