PIANO MUSIC - Abeille Musique

eally a very simple hymn, and ‘The Changing Bells’ bt is
a straightforward setting of a little moral fable by Goethe in
which a recalcitrant boy is frightened by a dream of bells
into going to church as his mother has told him. Liszt does
not seek to elaborate in any way in these ten songs of
Robert and Clara—often giving almost the original piano
accompaniment in small type with the vocal line in
full-size notation distributed between the two hands.
Fallersleben’s ‘Coming of Spring’ bu, Schiller’s ‘The
Cowherd’s Farewell’ cl (which Liszt set before Schumann
did), and Mörike’s ‘The Spring it is’ cm tell their tales in
their titles, and Goethe’s ‘None but the lonely heart’ cn
(set by many a composer—four times by Beethoven)
requires no introduction, and ‘I shall creep from door to
door’ co is the third of the evocatively miserable Harper’s
Songs which were first well known in Schubert’s settings.
Despite the appalling rudeness eventually shown to
Liszt and his music by Clara Schumann—she removed
his name from the dedication on Robert Schumann’s
Fantasy, opus 17, and she rejected Liszt’s dedication to her
of his Paganini Études, having been initially quite besotted
by him—Liszt tried to disseminate three of her songs in
very delicate and literal transcriptions. All that can be
observed is that neither the songs nor the transcriptions
took hold, and Clara’s Rückert settings, ‘Why would you
ask more questions’ cp—a plea not to question a lover’s
sincerity—and ‘In your eyes have I seen eternal love’ cq
and the setting of Rollet’s love and nature poem
‘Mysterious whispers here and there’ cr have a charm just
a bit too obviously derived from the music of her husband.
As for the remaining Schumann transcriptions,
‘Provençal Lovesong’ cs (Schumann’s title is actually
Provençalisches Lied) is a curious late work of Liszt’s
which somehow disembodies the original setting of
Uhland’s poem in praise of courtly love. The transcription
of ‘To the Sunshine’ ct—Reinick’s poem in folk style
about the sunlight’s effect upon nature and thence love—
is embellished by a central section cu which is a transcription
of Schumann’s setting of a translation of Robert
Burns’s ‘Oh, my luve’s like a red, red rose’. As in the
combined Robert Franz transcription, no violence is done
in any way to either of the original songs. The feverish joy
of the discovery that ‘she is yours’ informs the whole of
Schumann’s setting of Eichendorff’s ‘Spring Night’ dl—
the concluding song of the opus 39 Liederkreis, with its
constantly repeated chordal accompaniment. Liszt translates
this joy in an exquisite piece of piano writing.
‘Dedication’ dm—the first song from Schumann’s
Myrthen, opus 24, to a poem by Rückert—was, as the
world knows, a gift from Schumann to Clara, but we
cannot blame Liszt for wanting this great song to be much
more widely distributed, and, since Schumann’s song is
very easily come by nowadays, there is absolutely no need
for any offence to be taken at the glorious expansion of the
original in Liszt’s ever-popular transcription.
LESLIE HOWARD © 1991
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