PIANO MUSIC - Abeille Musique

The twenty-fourth Paganini Caprice is certainly the
best known, or at least its theme is, since it has been
widely employed by so many other composers for
variations of their own. Paganini wrote eleven variations
and a coda, and Liszt sticks to this plan in both editions of
his sixth study. The many differences between the two
Liszt pieces cannot be enumerated here; the second
version 6 is, as one would expect, not as monumentally
treacherous as the first bn and the textures vary
enormously—especially in Variation IX with its different
attempts to compensate for the wondrous effect of lefthand
pizzicato on the violin.
Mazeppa br is easily recognized as the immediate
precursor of the fourth of the Transcendental Studies
(see volume 4 of this series), and of the later symphonic
poem. It is a slightly reworked version of the fourth of the
Douze Grandes Études (see volume 34) where it bore no
title. Now, with a new introduction and coda (and, in the
present performance, taking the opportunity to present
Liszt’s ossia text for all passages where he provides one)
the work takes on a programme: the career of the hero of
Hugo’s poem—itself a homage to Byron’s—describing
the wild ride of Mazeppa tied to a galloping horse and
surviving in triumph.
According to a Liszt letter, the Technische Studien (a
series of technical exercises exploiting the widest range of
keyboard technique) were begun in 1868. They must have
been completed by 1871, as Imre Mezapple has shown in his
excellent edition. Now, whilst it is, one hopes, clear that
the present series of Liszt’s music for piano solo is intended
to be as complete as scholarship will allow, the line
must be drawn at this work. Wonderful as they are, Liszt’s
methods for practising scales, arpeggios, chords, repeated
notes, and a hundred things besides, usually through all
the keys, do not make musical compositions and would
be as interesting to most listeners as a dripping tap—and
they would fill half a dozen compact discs with ease! The
only example to be included here is the sole exception in
the entire oeuvre: a little two-page effort that is a piece in
itself, in which tremolos and leaps are studied. This
number bs is part of the third section of Liszt’s work
which went missing in 1874 and which he thought he
would have to write out again, but did not, and which
turned up as recently as 1975, settling for ever the doubts
that the ‘12 große Etüden’, as this volume was called,
were anything other than technical exercises rather than
composed studies similar to Liszt’s other famous works of
like title.
LESLIE HOWARD © 1998
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