PIANO MUSIC - Abeille Musique

INTRODUCTION
The Complete Liszt Piano Music
That first Liszt disc was made in October 1985 and must have been one of the longest
LPs ever issued. It was recorded digitally so that when the CD became the order of the day
it was issued in that format. During 1986 I travelled the world with ten recital programmes
that between them included all of Liszt’s published original solo works—not counting
anything which was his rearrangement of his own music, and only utilizing final
versions—and at the beginning of 1987 the recordings got seriously underway. Any
original plans to restrict the scope of the project—by not including transcriptions, or
alternative versions, for instance—were shelved. But neither I nor anyone at Hyperion
had really calculated how vast the labour would become as more and more unpublished
material came to light. An early projection of the series postulated 48 CDs. Somewhat later
this was revised to 70, then 80, and finally there were 94 (plus a bonus CD single). Even
Ted Perry would have blanched if I’d gone to him in 1985 and said: ‘What about recording
the complete piano music of Liszt? It’ll fit all right onto 90-odd discs!’ But as the project
mushroomed he kept faith, and although there were one or two moments when it looked
an impossible mountain to climb I managed to do the required work to prepare so much
material for performance and recording. Most of the recordings were made in churches—
a circumstance that always gave me particular pleasure, since so much of Liszt’s output is
so closely related to his faith. Since the completion of the series in 1999, enough material
has come to light for four further CDs: Liszt: New Discoveries. So, 98 CDs plus the bonus
disc, and the total would have reached 100 if some of the still-missing manuscripts had
come to light.
It is a pleasure to relate that, having immersed myself so thoroughly in the music of
one man for so long, I have emerged with an even deeper love and respect for Liszt, both
the man and the musician, and I can certainly say with Alfred Brendel that ‘there is no
composer I would rather meet’. Because of the catholicity of Liszt’s own interests, it is
impossible to study his works in any kind of insularity from the music of many earlier
generations, of his contemporaries, and of his successors. It was important to make a
study of, say, Beethoven’s symphonies or Schubert’s songs and piano duets before
recording Liszt’s transcriptions of them, although the originals of one or two of his pieces
remain elusive. Who knows the original of Francesco Pezzini’s Una stella amica? Or the
opera Tony by Queen Victoria’s cousin Ernst? But, whatever the motivation behind Liszt’s
great corpus of fantasies, paraphrases and transcriptions, there lies a duty upon the
performer to get the background properly absorbed by knowing the originals, as well as
the circumstances of Liszt’s reworkings or elaborations, wherever this is possible. It is
simply amazing how many of the works which Liszt so modestly called transcriptions are
no less original compositions than any great sets of formal variations on external themes,
and it is good finally to be able to see the end of the old ignorant prejudice against such
pieces. Liszt’s reworkings of his own music are a special case, and it is impossible to take
a comprehensive view of his art without investigating his choral and orchestral music, or
the wonderful songs. Yet, how many students clatter through the Liebesträume or the
Petrarch Sonnets without even knowing that they were songs in their first musical
embodiments? And even after recording more than 120 hours of his piano music, I still
have to admit that the oratorio Christus is probably his finest work (conducting it has
been a profoundly revelatory experience); at least one can play the orchestral movements
in Liszt’s own inimitably magical partitions de piano.
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