PIANO MUSIC - Abeille Musique

thought was to extend three bars in the last verse from
into time. Although this MS is obviously ready for the
engraver, with text underlaid, and all dynamics, fingerings
and other performance directions in place, Liszt made a
neater fair copy, signed ‘FL Juin ’72’, in which he made a
last-minute inspired change of one note in the coda from
E sharp to E natural.
The great conductor and pianist Hans von Bülow
(1830–1894) is little remembered as a composer,
although he had quite some success in his day. As a
performer he was as adept at Wagner and Liszt as he later
became with Brahms; as a composer he was overshadowed
by all of the composers he admired. His music
is conservative by nature, but the influence of the new
music is apparent; his interpolation in the 1884 edition of
Liszt’s Concerto pathétique for two pianos recalls the
musical language of Tristan, whilst much of his surviving
piano music is of a lighter nature. (Liszt arranged one of
his piano pieces—the Mazurka-Fantasie for orchestra—
in 1865.) Sadly, history recalls him most readily as having
been married to Liszt’s daughter Cosima and being
cuckolded by Wagner, an episode which brought von
Bülow much public ridicule, and which caused a rift
between Liszt and Wagner for some years. Sadly, von
Bülow’s pleasing song Tanto gentile e tanto onesta never
entered the repertoire, Liszt’s enthusiasm for it notwithstanding.
The piano transcription is simple and straightforward,
and the original song a worthy setting of Dante
Alighieri. (‘My lady is so gentle and modest when she
greets others that every tongue trembles and is still, and
eyes do not dare to look upon her.’) Both works merit
revival.
Die Gräberinsel der Fürsten zu Gotha is the first of
Liszt’s efforts to promote the music of Crown Prince Ernst,
later Ernst Herzog zu Sachsen-Coburg-Gotha (1818–
1893), although it was not published until 1985. (Liszt’s
3
Jagdchor und Steyrer aus der Oper Tony and his Zweite
Festmarsch are both based on themes from Duke Ernst’s
operas—see Volumes 6 and 29 of the present series.) The
subject of the poem (by Apollonius von Maltitz) is the
island in the lake on the estate of Gotha which the Duke’s
family had had constructed especially as the site for the
family tombs. The original song is the second of a set of
seven, all now enshrouded in that particular dust reserved
for the compositions of amateur royals. Liszt actually
made his transcription whilst staying as Ernst’s guest at
the Coburg estate on 6 November 1842, and he probably
played it in a recital at the Gotha estate three days later. A
minor work by an aristocratic dabbler it may be, but Liszt
lends it a good deal of musical substance by his serious
approach.
The second version of the Élégie sur des motifs du
Prince Louis Ferdinand de Prusse has already appeared
in this series, in Volume 4. The earlier version is full of
interest in its different treatment of the same material. The
structure of the piece is Liszt’s, and although the themes
stem from another noble dilettante, Prince Louis (1772–
1806) was far more distinguished a musician than Duke
Ernst. However, Liszt’s piece has always been catalogued as
an original work rather than a transcription, so much has
he woven the original melodic ideas into a new conception.
(The opportunity must be seized here to correct a blunder
in the note to the revised version of this piece in Volume 4.
Prince Louis was killed in battle, and never married. The
Princess who gave Liszt the volume of Louis’s music was
not his wife, but was married to his nephew who
succeeded to the title.)
Otto Lessmann (1844–1918) was better known in his
day as a journalist, a theatre manager and a producer than
as a composer, and he probably composed the three
Tannhäuser songs for a dramatic production of Julius
Wolff’s play. The first—Der Lenz ist gekommen (‘Spring