PIANO MUSIC - Abeille Musique

T
HE SEEMING ENDLESSNESS of Liszt’s output is
further compounded when one examines his work
as an editor. His name appears on so much music
in this capacity that one is entitled perhaps to question
how much actual editing Liszt did. Certainly he can be said
merely to have overseen corrected reprints of much music
to which he may only have added a few fingerings. But, as
well he knew, the lustre of his name meant sales and the
further propagation of the music which he loved and
which he wanted others to know and enjoy. Liszt’s name
appears on editions of the Beethoven Sonatas, but the text
is very clean and, by the standards of the day, accurate.
Here, as in other similar editions (the Beethoven Masses,
piano music and chamber music, major Bach organ
works, Bach Preludes and Fugues in C sharp minor,
Chopin Études, Field Nocturnes, Handel Fugue in E minor,
the Haydn Piano Trios (not listed in the usual catalogues),
Scarlatti ‘Cat’s Fugue’ or Viole’s Études Gartenlaube) he is
generally reissuing previously published texts—there is
no evidence of a return to manuscript sources. Other
works of his own appeared in tandem with some of his
editions: the Bach organ works include Liszt’s piano
transcriptions of seven major pieces, the editions of the
Beethoven Piano Concertos Nos 3, 4, and 5 contain Liszt’s
own reduction of the orchestral parts for a second
piano—and for both pianos whenever the solo part is
silent; his reworkings of Gottschalg’s arrangements of
various Liszt works make them into his own transcriptions;
and there is a special group of pieces where Liszt
presents a reissue of a clean published text with his own
annotations clearly distinguished on separate staves. These
ossia suggestions are sometimes just for a few notes or a
short passage, where he may indicate slight alterations
to the original text (Schubert dances, Weber sonatas,
Hummel Septet) and sometimes, as in several examples in
the present recorded programme, his alternative passages
2
amount to extensive rethinking of the textures, amounting
to transcriptions in all but name. It must be emphasized
that, even in these cases, the original text is presented
without adornment and Liszt’s alternatives are printed
separately, usually in smaller type.
Liszt’s predilection for Schubert’s Grosse Fantasie
(better known as the ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy—tracks 1 –
4) became almost a preoccupation. Schubert’s masterpiece
contains the kernel of Liszt’s own system of thematic
transformation and the unity of several movements in one.
Liszt produced a famous version of the work for piano and
orchestra (and one for two pianos) by about 1851, but the
version for solo piano is much later. Schubert’s text is
presented with many an alternative suggestion for the first
three movements, either to replace some of Schubert’s
less pianistic textures (it must be remembered that at the
time practically everybody, from Schubert onwards,
declared the work unpianistic and unplayable as it stood)
or to take advantage of the greater compass of the
keyboard in the mid-nineteenth century. In the final
section Liszt offers a completely independent text printed
after Schubert’s original, in which the fearsome arpeggios
and semiquavers are all but eliminated and the texture is
much more orchestral. Naturally, these days everyone
plays Schubert’s original text, but without this interesting
arrangement, valid in its own right as more than merely a
testimony to late-Romantic practice, the work might never
have reached the general repertoire.
Amongst Liszt’s other Schubert editions, two stand out:
Liszt edited all of the Impromptus, with minor suggestions
of occasional alternative passages or distribution of
material between the hands, but nothing in any of the
remaining Schubert editions would justify a place in the
Liszt catalogue as transcriptions except the two works
recorded here. The Impromptu in E flat major 5 has
so many clever little proposals to make a fuller texture and