PIANO MUSIC - Abeille Musique

Prelude and Polka: it is clear from his correspondence
that Liszt was thrilled with the collaborative volume
of variations and character pieces on a children’s theme
(for some reason identified as ‘Chopsticks’ in some
catalogues, but actually just a simple exercise in the
widening of the interval of a major second to an octave,
very similar to the great organ fugue subject by Bach for
his so-called ‘Wedge’ Prelude and Fugue) which first
appeared in 1879. As with Dargomizhsky’s Tarentelle, but
with the student player in the treble, the little theme is
played throughout as an ostinato, while the composition
unfolds below it. For the second edition of these,
Paraphrases: 24 Variations et 15 petites pièces sur le
thème favori et obligé by Borodin, Lyadov, Cui and
Rimsky-Korsakov, Liszt composed a touching little tribute
to be inserted before Borodin’s Polka. On one part of the
single-page manuscript Liszt describes his work as a variation,
on another as a prelude, the more apt description.
Despite the entries in the published catalogues, Liszt’s
Prelude is for piano solo. Borodin’s amusing Polka is
included to set Liszt’s prelude in context. We are grateful
to Philip Moore for so kindly obliging with the ‘thème
favori et obligé’!
The Russian part of this programme concludes with
Liszt’s enormous transcription of the orchestral
Tarentelle by César Cui (1835–1918). Liszt enlarged the
shape and scope of the piece, using it as a springboard for
one of his last fantastic flights of imagination, comparable
with his reworking of Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre.
The Hungarian part of the programme begins with yet
another version of the Rákóczi-Marsch. (Other versions
appear in Volumes 27, 28 and 29 of this series.) Although
Liszt made several ostensibly simplified and scaled-down
versions of quite a number of his piano pieces, he never
seems to have understood sufficiently the technical range
of the average amateur. So, whilst many difficulties are
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removed, other rough places are not really made plain,
and such things as the ‘version populaire’ of the Rákóczi-
Marsch never quite fulfil their vaunted object. As ever,
Liszt cannot help but add tiny harmonic, melodic or
rhythmic details which differ from the concert versions of
the piece—and this text is only one of seven for solo piano
which survive complete.
As the great Hungarian Liszt scholar Dr Mária Eckhardt
has pointed out, Liszt’s work on the Virag dál—Chant
des fleurs (Flower Song) of Kornél Ábrányi Sr. (1822–
1903) is not really that of transcription, but of elaboration.
Ábrányi’s original is a song, and he himself transcribed
it for piano. Liszt made numerous small alterations to
the transcription, and added a certain amount of new
material, particularly at the end of the central section.
Count Léo Festetics (1800–1884) was one of the band
of Hungarian aristocrats who sponsored the young Liszt.
He is the dedicatee of many of Liszt’s specifically
Hungarian works, and he remained Liszt’s lifelong
friend and supporter. As a composer he remains almost
unknown, and the Liszt transcription of his song
Spanisches Ständchen (Spanish Serenade) has not yet
been published. The manuscript is in the Goethe-Schiller
Archive in Weimar, who generously provided a copy to the
Liszt Society. From the state of this much-altered
manuscript it is clear that Liszt took quite some trouble to
decide the final texture of the transcription, which comes
over as an excellent example of the extraordinarily vast
literature of Spanish pieces by non-Spanish composers.
Count Géza Zichy (1849–1924) was quite a successful
opera composer in his day, and was further renowned for
producing a large corpus of piano music for the left hand
alone (as a boy he had lost his right arm whilst hunting)
including a viciously difficult transcription of Schubert’s
Erlkönig. His Valse d’Adèle is the third of a set of Six
Studies of 1876 for the left hand (dedicated to Liszt, who