PIANO MUSIC - Abeille Musique

of the 1830s, but Liszt wisely removed all the demisemiquavers
in the 1851 version. Nevertheless, the sheer
pandemonium here and elsewhere where this theme
occurs is undeniably effective. In 1851 Liszt removed a
most striking idea: the third theme, which follows hard
upon the second, dactylic hunting motif, keeps the metre
and rhythm intact in the left hand, whilst the right hand
picks out a new theme with one note to its every four, but
in a metre which does not square arithmetically with the
left hand—dizzying both to play and to hear. (Later, Liszt
made the melody conform to the left hand.) The later title
Wilde Jagd (‘Wild Hunt’) would have suited even better
here.
Apart from the catches in the breath created by the
addition in 1851 of rests at the beginning of each melodic
group, the Ninth Study and the later Ricordanza are very
similar. Here there are rather thicker chordal textures,
and one or two disquieting dissonances towards the coda,
but the same air of nostalgia is ineluctable. The 1826
forerunner of this piece remains the most astonishing
piece of the juvenile set—the themes and harmonies
were taken over almost unchanged in 1837, and the
filigree decoration sets off their beauty in the subtlest way.
The Tenth Study, usually accounted to be the finest of
the 1851 set, is even more imposing in the 1837 version,
although Liszt’s later solution for the layout of the opening
material produces a more restless effect by eliminating
the demand for playing melody notes with the left hand in
amongst double sixths in the right. In a very solid sonata
structure, the 1837 text does not break the flow towards
the end of the development, but does ask for some very
awkward playing of enormous stretches. (Liszt’s hand
almost certainly contracted as he grew older. Amy Fay
reliably reports that the old Liszt could just take the blacknote
tenth chords at the end of the slow movement in
Beethoven’s ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata. In all his revisions
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Liszt removes or arpeggiates any interval greater than a
ninth, whereas tenths and elevenths abound in the works
from his years as a public performer.) The 1837 version
has a much longer coda, which abruptly changes metre
and becomes ferocious, in accordance with Liszt’s own
performance directions.
The Eleventh piece begins similarly to its later version,
with minor differences in the harmonic language, but the
whole musical fabric of the second theme is much more
complex, contrapuntally, rhythmically and harmonically.
Before the second, grandiose, appearance of this theme
there is an extended passage at great speed which Liszt
dropped in the final version, presumably because it had
nothing to do with the title now appended to the work:
Harmonies du soir—‘Evening harmonies’. (The
listeners who rightly complained that, in Volume 4 of this
series, the opening phrases of Harmonies du soir utilised
a harmonic alteration stemming from an edition made by
one of Liszt’s later students rather than the 1851 text may
be pacified to note that the 1837 harmony is exactly as
Liszt gives it.)
When Liszt transformed the Twelfth Study into Chasseneige
(‘Snow flurry’) he introduced some chromatic
thirds to reinforce the idea of the whirlwinds, and they
may seem unexpectedly absent here. But in compensation
there is a beautiful introduction which was later
discarded, and which reappears at the recapitulation,
where later we find a great many scales. In general, there
is rather more of the tremolo in the 1837 version, and one
or two typically pungent harmonic effects made more
conventional in 1851. The final cadence, as in the later
version, cannot be used to make a thunderous ending,
and Liszt leaves us poised on a second-inversion triad, as
if there might be more to come. But the only extant page
of sketches for an F sharp major study which should have
begun the second part of the enterprise clearly belongs to