PIANO MUSIC - Abeille Musique

I
T IS PROBABLY ONLY JUST that the best known work of
the greatest transcriber in the history of Western music
should be a transcription, but fortunate, at least, that it
should be a transcription of one of his own works. The
third of the Liebesträume, often quite erroneously entitled
‘Liebestraum No 3’ (the plural applies to each piece), is
one of the world’s most treasured melodies, and it has
been the piano transcription, rather than the equally
splendid original song, that has claimed a permanent
place on the short-list of best love-inspired themes. But all
three pieces are characterised by generous melodic lines,
and they work very well as a group—as do the original
songs. Each piece bears the title ‘Notturno’, and the
subtitle—the song title, in fact—and the full text of the
song follow. As a triptych, the Liebesträume invite
comparison with the three settings of Petrarch sonnets,
which also became better known as piano pieces. (In this
series of recordings those transcriptions will appear in due
course in both versions.) For the German songs, however,
Liszt used two different poets: Ludwig Uhland’s Hohe
Liebe speaks of the heaven on earth that has come from
being drunk in the arms of love, and his Seliger Tod (the
piece has often been known by the poem’s first line:
‘Gestorben war ich’) makes the conceit of love being a
happy death awakened by a kiss, while Ferdinand
Freiligrath’s O Lieb! enjoins us to love whilst we may, for
love lost is miserable. (There is an earlier piano piece
based on the second of these songs which will appear later
in this series, and a later echo of it in the second of the
Meyendorff Klavierstücke, which has already been
recorded on volume 11: Late Pieces.)
The two Liszt Songbooks contain twelve of his early
songs in very straightforward transcriptions, in the sense
that the music basically follows the original song bar-forbar,
with a certain amount of cadential licence but without
the addition of extended variation. Liszt makes every effort
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to preserve all of the character, if not the actual text, of the
original accompaniment, and he adds the vocal line to the
texture, often distributed between the two hands and
sometimes doubled at the octave. All of these transcriptions
are rarities, largely due to Liszt’s acute selfcriticism
in the matter of his songs. All six of the
transcriptions in the first book follow upon an issue in one
volume of the six original songs. But Liszt withdrew the
songs and revised them, and allowed the transcriptions to
fade away because they no longer represented his attitude
to the poems. Eventually he made a transcription of the
revised setting of Heine’s Die Lorelei which was for a time
rather popular, but the others remained in only the onepiano
version. The second book suffered a worse fate: all
six transcriptions remained in manuscript. Four of the
songs later underwent revision. The transcriptions were
believed lost for many years, although they were
tantalisingly mentioned in a few catalogues, and it was not
until the excellent Neue Liszt-Ausgabe volume I/18 of
1985 that they were finally published.
The poetry which inspired all these works is generally
familiar. Heine’s Die Lorelei tells the familiar story of the
siren-like witch who haunts a rock in the river Rhine—
Liszt’s dramatic setting (in either version) is vastly
superior to the tawdry little Silcher version beloved of
amateur children’s choruses, but the revised version is
more subtle, less four-square, and there may even be a
deliberate hint of the Tristan prelude in the introduction;
Am Rhein im schönen Strome (‘In the beautiful waters of
the Rhine’) is also by Heine and best known in Schumann’s
setting in Dichterliebe—but Schumann changes
‘schönen’ to ‘heiligen’ and, having thus canonised the
river, makes his song an allegory, whereas Liszt remains
faithful to the beauty of the waters which he reflects in a
florid accompaniment of either 9 or 12 notes to the bar
(he used the 12-note version in the transcription);