PIANO MUSIC - Abeille Musique

Chézy, and deals with Light living in the Depths and
Shining (‘In der Tiefe wohnt das Licht. Licht daß
leuchtet …’). Both Schubert and Liszt manage to make
something quite beautiful from this tripe.
By 1846 Liszt had probably noticed that his long and
complex Mélodies hongroises—his piano solo version of
Schubert’s Divertissement à l’hongroise—were not
being taken up, except for the central March (see Volume
31). He recast the piece, making trenchant cuts and
simplifying a lot of the texture. The new publication bears
the German title Schuberts Ungarische Melodien, and
adds the legend ‘auf eine neue leichtere Art gesetzt’
(‘arranged in a new easier manner’). Typically, Liszt’s
understanding of what an amateur might find easy was
compromised by the fact that he himself seemingly found
nothing to be difficult. As a result, many passages are
well out of the range of domestic music-making. The less
weighty effect of this version gained it a brief life in
concert, but sadly this version has been out of print for
nearly 150 years.
Liszt had already made two transcriptions from Die
schöne Müllerin—Trockne Blumen and Ungeduld—
when he produced his set of Six Mélodies favorites in
1846, in which the former does not appear and the latter
is transcribed anew and in a different key. Liszt makes
a palindromic key pattern by setting the pieces in B flat
major, G minor, C minor/C major/C minor, G major and
B flat major, even though this puts the narrative of the
original quite out of order and changes Schubert’s keys
for numbers 4 and 6—originally in B major and A major.
But the musical argument is transcendent when the text
is less germane.
Die schöne Müllerin (‘The Fair Mill-maid’, D795) is
far too familiar to require much explanation. Liszt chooses
numbers 1, 19, 14, 17, 2 and 7 from the original twenty
settings of Wilhelm Müller: Das Wandern (‘Wandering’)
5
is two verses shorter than the song expressing the poet’s
joy in tramping about, but is delightfully varied. The conversation
about the misery and the happy mystery of love,
Der Müller und der Bach (‘The Miller and the Stream’) is
extended by an extra variation to the last verse and is one
of the finest of all Liszt’s transcriptions, so close does it get
to letter and spirit of the song whilst writing inventively
and originally at the same time. The two verses of Der
Jäger (‘The Huntsman’)—in which the poet asks the
hunter to keep away from the stream and shoot only that
which frightens his loved one—are given a very sprightly
decoration, and are set either side of the transcription of
Die böse Farbe (‘The Evil Colour’). This is shorn of its
short introduction and coda, but handled very ebulliently,
with some treacherous double notes in the right hand to
stress the pride and boldness of the lover’s preferred and
mocking green.
Wohin? (‘Whither?’) solves the problem of adding the
voice to the accompaniment by dividing the babbling
brook which has attracted the poet’s attention between
the inner fingers of the two hands, and occasionally by
letting it wash the melody from above; and Ungeduld
(‘Impatience’)—the poet is desperate to proclaim his
love to the whole world—is set, like the first song, with
one fewer verse than Schubert, in a theme and two
variations. (For the later versions of these transcriptions,
entitled Müllerlieder, see Volume 33.)
The remaining transcriptions on the first disc are
based upon three very familiar songs—Meeresstille
(‘Sea Calm’, D216), in which Liszt manages to convey
motionless water and dread at the same time with deep
tremolos and arpeggios (this is the earlier version of a
transcription which was later modified slightly for the collection
of twelve transcriptions, S558); Die Forelle (‘The
Trout’, D550d), is given in its later, somewhat simplified
and totally recast second transcription, still with one extra