PIANO MUSIC - Abeille Musique

The obvious desire to propagate interest in Beethoven
through these transcriptions may seem to have been
surpassed by their ready accessibility in concert and
recording, but it would be a sad matter to leave these
works aside on those grounds. For us, it is a valuable asset
to our appreciation of both composers to see how the later
master approached the earlier, and we may even
comprehend something of the spirit in which midnineteenth-century
orchestral performances were given;
certainly one can tell, from the relative prominence which
Liszt gives to them, that a number of details are less
attention-drawing to our modern ears. But the works have
their own right to existence as super-sonatas for piano,
most ingeniously employing the devices of that instrument,
and to those with a thorough knowledge of
Beethoven’s scores it is often a delightful astonishment to
behold that Liszt has substituted Beethoven’s text with
material which looks very different but which immediately
conjures up the sound world of the original orchestration.
Although everybody knows the Beethoven scores
nowadays, Liszt thought it essential to give many details of
the original instrumentation, both to help study the
orchestral texture at one remove and to provide a clue to
the colouring required from the pianist. So it is quite clear
from his scores when a forte for full orchestra has to be
differentiated from, say, a solo oboe forte.
Liszt reproduces all the metronome marks of the
1860s Breitkopf edition which, as is well known, stem
from Beethoven himself. But it is doubtful that Liszt
intended them to be observed absolutely, and in the cases
of the earlier editions Liszt did not include them. Except
where Liszt’s pianistic resolution of Beethoven’s text
simply precludes any possibility of observing them (for
example, no piano from Liszt’s time to the present day
could possibly cope with the prescribed speed of the
repeated notes in the finale of Symphony No 8) an attempt
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is made in these recordings to arrive at an acceptable
proximity.
Now it has become the fashion, under the hands of
some of the sadly small number of pianists who make any
regular attempt to present these works on the stage or on
record, to ‘improve’ upon Liszt’s text by adding details
from Beethoven’s scores which Liszt suppressed, usually
for reasons of clarity or to avoid too much octave doubling,
and thus producing ‘new’ transcriptions whose sound is
neither Beethoven’s nor Liszt’s. This practice is selfdefeating.
The present performances attempt to reproduce
Liszt’s final thoughts upon all these transcriptions with
one sole caveat: where there has been a slip of the pen (a
very rare occurrence) it has been tacitly corrected, and
when the editions known to Liszt of Beethoven’s scores
contain errors only brought to light by more recent
scholarship, Beethoven’s readings are restored. But no retranscribing
of any kind has been undertaken.
Symphony No 1 in C major Op 21
Symphony No 1 in C major, Opus 21, was composed by
Beethoven in 1800 and dedicated to Baron van Swieten.
Liszt’s transcription (dedicated, like all nine in the final
publication, to von Bülow) dates from 1863, the year in
which the decision to complete the whole series was made.
Liszt had offered to transcribe all nine Symphonies for
Breitkopf as early as 1850. The contract between them was
settled some time in 1863.
Right at the outset Liszt’s score offers two solutions to
an effective piano rendering. As so often with Liszt, one
version is clearly designed with concert performance in
mind, the other with more modest music-making. (And,
just as often, Liszt offers a simpler solution for only some
parts of the work and leaves other serious technical
problems without alternatives. Thus, despite his desire for
all sorts and conditions of pianists to study the pieces,