PIANO MUSIC - Abeille Musique

The art of composing – or, for that matter, playing – piano duets has always been relegated to the
periphery of musical importance, despite the rather high quality of much of the literature, and perhaps
because of the amateur nature of much of the performing. Like the lied, the duet was conceived for
domestic use, but if Mozart could produce something as wonderful as the F major Sonata, K497, or
Schubert the F minor Fantasy, Op 103/D940, then this music must surely claim the attention of the
concert hall. Liszt too wrote a good many duets, but usually in the nature of arrangements for private
study or performance of his own orchestral or piano music. His solo versions of Schubert duets seem
determined to show, in the way that duet performances are not often able, the extraordinary breadth of
Schubert’s imagination in a garb more suitable for presentation to the many, without doing any kind of
disservice to Schubert’s original thoughts.
Schubert’s piano duet Divertissement à l’hongroise, Op 54/D818, is a late work of enormous breadth,
comparable to the last piano sonatas, the string quintet and the last symphony in the almost leisurely
length of its working-out. The title belies the work’s serious intent, but the Hungarian flavour turns up
everywhere, obviously in the march, but very delicately and wistfully in the outer movements. No folk
songs are apparently employed but the style of the gypsy improvisation is worked into a piece more
tightly constructed than its sprawling length might suggest. Liszt was clearly entranced by the piece,
probably for its Hungarian qualities as well as for his general enthusiasm for things Schubertian, but,
typically, resisted Schubert’s title (Liszt wrote very little music that he considered to be ‘diverting’) and
allowed for the three pieces, which he simply called Mélodies hongroises, to be performed separately
(after all, in Liszt’s very respectful but colourful arrangements the whole work takes nearly fifty minutes
in performance). The outer movements are in G minor and each consists of three statements of a theme,
varied upon repetition, interspersed with two entirely different alternative sections, in every case in a
complex ternary form entailing the reprise of almost every section with ornamental variation.
(The scheme may be simply described as something like: A–BCB–A–DED–A–coda.) The march forms
a splendid foil for these grand works and it became independently famous in its day, to the extent that
Liszt reissued it many times with all manner of alterations to the shape and effect of the piece. These
versions will be discussed as they appear.
Now this first group of Liszt’s Schubert transcriptions passes to his first and last offerings in this field –
Die Rose, in the first version of 1833, and Der Gondelfahrer, which Liszt transcribed some fifty years
later. (Many catalogues suggest 1838 as a date for this work. This is apparently a case of dyslexia which
has been perpetuated without checking down the years. The manuscript and corrected proofs, which the
present writer has seen, leave no doubt whatsoever that 1883 is the correct date.) Although Die Rose
later appeared in various assortments of Schubert/Liszt song transcriptions (and this is an absolutely
labyrinthine nightmare for the researcher), it was first published as a single number. The present writer
had the good fortune to study this piece from a copy of the first edition signed and inscribed by Liszt
‘à son ami F. Chopin’. Schubert’s song, Op 73/D745a (nothing to do with Heidenröslein despite various
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