PIANO MUSIC - Abeille Musique

long-term serious reputation. To modern audiences, his
ramble on the national anthem is a bit of fun, but of slight
merit—although there is a clever hint at ‘Rule, Britannia’
in the coda and one or two striking harmonic effects.
The origins of the Canzone napolitana remain a
mystery to the present writer. It seems that the tune is not
a folksong, and it clearly has the air of a composed salon
piece of some kind. Liszt was not in Italy in the year of its
composition, although he had certainly been to Naples
earlier and at length, and there are no clues to the work’s
provenance in the published correspondence. However,
the music is staightforward enough, and delicately laid out
for the piano in F sharp major. For some reason, Liszt
almost immediately reissued the piece transposed to F
major with a few small alterations—especially at the
end—under the subtitle ‘Notturno pour piano’ and the
description ‘Edition nouvelle. Arrangement élégant’. Both
versions are recorded here.
Those familiar with the Sixth Hungarian Rhapsody will
have no difficulty in recognising the materials of the three
Ungarische Nationalmelodien. In fact, much of the
content of these three pieces had appeared already in the
collection Magyar Dalok—the first part of Liszt’s first
cycle of pieces based on Hungarian and gypsy music—in
No 5 (to which Liszt added a short introduction and a
coda), No 4 (which was reprinted unchanged) and the
second part of No 11 (with a new Prélude and a coda,
neither of which recurs in the Sixth Rhapsody).
Liszt apparently believed the Hussite hymn upon which
the Hussitenlied is based to be of rather more ancient
origin than it transpires to be. Noting that the melody is by
Josef Theodor Krov (1797–1859) we may dispense with
Liszt’s continuation of the title as ‘aus dem 15. Jahrhundert’.
English audiences and film buffs will possibly
recognize the tune readily enough, since it served Balfe so
well in The Bohemian Girl and transferred to the silver
3
screen in the unlikely hands of Laurel and Hardy. Krov wrote
the tune as a drinking song, but in no time it became a
patriotic Bohemian anthem. Liszt was not alone in believing
it to be a Hussite chorale, and wrote his excellent elaboration
of it for his first concert tour to Prague in 1840, where
it won all hearts. Liszt begins with what he terms a ‘Version
littérale’, which in the first edition is printed in small text
and may apparently be omitted. But it makes a fine
introduction to the fantasy proper, and is included here.
The jury is still out on the question of whether the
influence of the Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein
upon Liszt was, as Sellars and Yeatman would put it, a
‘Good or a Bad Thing’. She was, at any rate, the dominant
woman in the last forty years of Liszt’s life, and, whilst
being responsible for almost all his social and domestic
difficulties over that time, was also the one who won him
to permanent and serious composition from the life of the
travelling virtuoso who composed as best and as often as
he was able. Liszt met Carolyne in Kiev in February 1847,
and in the October of that year stayed with her at her estate
in the Ukraine, Woronince. His Glanes de Woronince
(‘Gleanings from Woronince’) is frequently described as
some kind of preservation of local folk melodies which
Liszt heard on this estate for the first time. Since we know
that the second piece is supposedly Polish and that there is
a good chance that the melodies in it were not new to Liszt,
and since we know that Liszt heard the melody of the third
piece sung by a blind girl busking with her grandfather in
Kiev, much of this argument falls away. It seems much
more likely that it was the very piano pieces which were
gleaned from the stay at Woronince, in the case of the third
the recollection of a public improvisation already given in
Kiev, and the second piece is surely a specific homage to
the Polish nationality of the princess.
The original Ukrainian song behind the first piece is a
complicated tale of jealousy and revenge. Paraphrasing