PIANO MUSIC - Abeille Musique

C, and it to this note that it will return in concluding
bitterness.
A greater contrast with the preceding piece than the
Festvorspiel would stretch the imagination: comfortably,
even ponderously in C major, the piece was composed for
a collection published in Stuttgart in 1857 called Das
Pianoforte. Its subtitle ‘Prélude’ may only refer to its
being the first piece is the miscellany by different
composers (Liszt’s MS also bears the work’s original title:
‘Preludio pomposo’), but the piece has the style of an
academic processional march.
This brings us to Liszt’s marches. It seems only
reasonable to take this opportunity to make a brief apologium
for the march as a vehicle for serious composition.
The sway of fashion is cruel, and a march, unless it be
safely embedded in a larger work of overtly lofty nature
such as an opera or a symphony, is generally treated with
affable contempt. Popular exceptions like Elgar’s orchestral
marches represent the merest fraction of a vast and
predominantly neglected literature to which most important
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century composers contributed
in great variety. Setting aside for the moment the
marches written for outdoor performance and actual
marching—usually for wind band, and containing treasures
from Handel and Berlioz through Sousa to the
present day—the march occurs quite regularly in
baroque keyboard music, is a well-stocked department of
occasional music by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, and is
represented in the output of all the Romantic composers
from Schubert to Richard Strauss. In more recent times
the march has been used to depict man’s inhumanity and
‘serious’ composers have reserved the form almost
entirely for inclusion in large-scale works: it is impossible
to imagine Mahler or Shostakovich without the march, for
example. The current attitude seems to be that Beethoven’s
funeral marches (in the ‘Eroica’ Symphony and
in the Opus 26 Piano Sonata) are perfectly decent music,
but that his Zapfenstreiche, and even his own orchestration
of the Opus 26 march may be airily dismissed.
Granted, Wagner’s funeral march in Götterdämmerung is
much superior to his Kaisermarsch, but the latter can
certainly compare with the Entry of the Guests march
from Tannhäuser. Mozart’s marches only appear smuggled
into large boxed sets of recordings—although no one
complains about the marches in Figaro and Die Zauberflöte.
Schubert’s marches are never heard, with the solitary
exception of one piano duet. And yet no consideration
of musical history over the last five centuries or so could
fail to notice how important the character of the march
has proved in the broadest range of music, and indeed
how it almost eclipses all other metrical patterns to the
point where practically all modern popular music is
slavishly attendant upon it.
Liszt’s marches have not so much had an unfair press
as no press at all. Like Beethoven and Schubert before
him, Liszt wrote many occasional pieces which he prepared
both for piano and for orchestra, and the majority
of his marches exist in both instrumentations, and often
for piano duet as well. It is impossible to say whether the
Heroischer Marsch in ungarischem Stil was written
first for the piano or for orchestra. (The excellent orchestral
score, one of Liszt’s earliest, remains unpublished,
and is usually omitted from catalogues, but it adds to the
destruction of the myth that he needed Conradi or Raff to
teach him to orchestrate rather than to help him to prepare
fair copies of scores from his instructions.) Written
for the King of Portugal in 1840, this effective work later
became the basis for the symphonic poem Hungaria.
The Seconde Marche hongroise, as the Ungarischer
Sturmmarsch is also known, was published in 1843 for
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