PIANO MUSIC - Abeille Musique

A study of Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Variations for piano
makes very reasonable practice ground for the finale of the
Symphony; Beethoven’s piano fugue is as uncompromisingly
unpianistic as his counterpoint in the symphonic
variations turns out to be in Liszt’s thorough effort to let
nothing be lost. Liszt’s solutions at the end of the
movement are especially interesting. In order to reflect the
enormous variety of orchestral colour which Beethoven
brings to the last triumphant statement of the melody,
Liszt takes the orchestral chords on the second and third
quavers of the bar and deposits them with much ado at the
bottom of the keyboard, leaving the middle ground for the
chords surrounding the theme and the upper reaches for
the semiquaver triplets of the strings, and, just before the
Presto coda, Liszt risks leaving out the cello and bass line
altogether in order to give a fairer presentation of the
delicate chords tossed from winds to upper strings. And
the coda itself avoids fatiguing the ear with endless
semiquaver chords by discovering alternative piano
textures every few bars to the end.
Symphony No 4 in B flat major Op 60
Like the Second Symphony, the Symphony No 4 (1806,
dedicated to Count Oppersdorf, transcribed 1863) has
always had something of an unjustified second-class status
beside the larger odd-numbered symphonies. The humour
in the piece is offset by the dark seriousness of the
introduction, which Liszt clearly had some difficulty in
transcribing: the main text unsatisfactorily presents
the held woodwind B flat octave for the requisite five bars,
with the right hand obliged to descend and move through
parallel octaves with the left, making the upper notes
impossible to sustain. The alternative, employed here, is a
demanding pianissimo five-bar octave tremolo for the
right hand, and the rest of the material, less one octave
doubling, is entrusted to the left hand alone. Liszt
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responds to the contrasting gaiety of the Allegro with a
barrage of piano pyrotechnics which recall the textures of
several of his studies. Remarkably, none of this does any
violence to Beethoven’s score. And Liszt’s decision to turn
the timpani B flat in the run-up to the recapitulation into
a tremolo with the lower F is a stroke of genius.
The sublime Adagio is transcribed with all its grandeur
intact, with fearless recourse to legato octave passagework
in the left hand wherever Beethoven’s original string parts
demand it. The main theme in all its guises requires the
utmost cantabile to be preserved by half of the right hand
whilst the other half sustains the dotted rhythm which
pervades the whole movement.
The third movement—the first of Beethoven’s
symphonic scherzos to adopt the five-part form of
scherzo-trio-scherzo-trio-coda which we see again in the
Sixth and Seventh Symphonies and which Beethoven
originally intended for the Fifth, too—is a boisterous,
straightforward affair, neatly transcribed. At the opening of
the Trio, Liszt gives two texts: the ossia conforming to
Beethoven’s letter, the main text moving the melody down
an octave, the better to separate the violin line.
The constant semiquaver figuration in the last movement
seems to have perplexed Liszt a little. In one passage
towards the end of the Symphony he omits it altogether
and proceeds in quavers, while in earlier places he
juxtaposes a single line of semiquavers with an alternative
suggestion of triplet octaves, or interlocking octaves
between the hands. But he has captured splendidly
Beethoven’s reckless bonhomie.
Symphony No 5 in C minor Op 67 (second version)
Beethoven’s Fifth. It seems astonishing to us that there
can ever have been a time when this most widely known of
all symphonies could ever have required any assistance in
its dissemination, but any study of the general standards of