PIANO MUSIC - Abeille Musique

and variations (five of them, plus coda) turns out to be
remarkably pianistic, and Liszt’s simplified alternative
passages may be by-passed. The same cannot be said of
the Scherzo, where Liszt’s version of what are straightforward
repeated notes on the violin turn the piece into
a veritable study. (Two wrong notes in the bass at the
mid-point of the Trio look like slips of the pen, and have
been corrected here to agree with Beethoven’s text.)
Liszt gives two versions of the violin cadenza in the
finale but, since the alternative one agrees closely to the
single-line violin part and the one in the main text is
more imaginative with its cascades of first inversion
triads, the choice is clear.
Probably as much for its being the harbinger of
Mozart’s death as for its intrinsic value, Mozart’s last
unfinished masterpiece, the Requiem, exercised the
minds of many nineteenth-century composers, and its
influence upon all of the great Requiem settings from
Cherubini through Berlioz, Liszt, Verdi, Dvor v ák and
Fauré and on to many more recent works has been
incalculable. Liszt confines himself to very clean
accounts of the last two portions of the Sequenz: the
powerful Confutatis, and the Lacrimosa, of which the
textual evidence is that Mozart sketched only the first
eight bars and Süssmayr completed it after Mozart’s
death. (However, if Süssmayr did write the rest of it he
did so in music of a quality which escaped him elsewhere,
and it begs the question of what he, Mozart and
others actually sang around Mozart’s death-bed when,
as the biographers tell us, the Lacrimosa was sung.)
The other little Mozart transcription is at one remove
from the original Ave verum corpus motet – which
also dates from the last year of Mozart’s life. Liszt had
already incorporated it into a work variously for piano,
piano duet, organ or orchestra entitled A la chapelle
Sixtine and this version merely adds a cadence to an
excerpt from that work. (Liszt did make a more literal
version of Mozart’s motet – for organ, S674a.)
We know that Verdi thought highly of Liszt as an
orchestral composer, but information about his attitude
to Liszt’s Verdi transcriptions is scanty. Liszt certainly
had approval from Verdi’s publishers for them, and
Ricordi was very proud to issue the pieces with both
composers’ names floridly decorated on the title pages.
But Liszt’s very personal view of Verdi, especially in the
last transcriptions – Aïda, Requiem, Boccanegra – but
already evident in the earlier ones, led him often to alter
the shape of Verdi’s melodies, and, as in the present
case, to produce really quite a different and even more
intimate musical shape. (This piece is one of a number
which Liszt produced for Ricordi which has alternative
passages for performance on a piano which allows
mechanical repetition of notes and chords which are
held down. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be
one of these curiosities in working order, or this
disquieting idea could be put to the test.)
By contrast, the two Rossini transcriptions are
very close to the originals: the Cujus animam so
delighted Liszt that he also arranged it for voice and
organ, and even for trombone and organ. The original
aria itself has always been popular, despite the
occasional humourless critic who disapproves of
Rossini’s treatment of sacred texts. La charité is less
well known, at any rate as a sacred chorus, but its
apparent familiarity stems from a version of the same
material at a far greater velocity (in the form of a
tarantella) and especially in Benjamin Britten’s
orchestration as the finale to his Soirées musicales.
The music of the Viennese composer Adalbert von
Goldschmidt (1848–1906) has disappeared pretty
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