PIANO MUSIC - Abeille Musique

vary repeated phrases that the extra systems printed above
the main text pretty well amount to another work
altogether. The Impromptu in G flat major 6 has only
one alternative passage: its recapitulation is astonishingly
rearranged with fulsome left-hand arpeggios and the
melody played an octave higher reinforced with chords in
the right hand; the rest of the piece is unaltered in any way.
(This work appears in Liszt’s edition, as in so many
nineteenth-century printings of the piece, in G major, and
in four crotchets to the bar rather than eight. Liszt was
apparently unaware of the original key, which is restored
here, and in which Liszt’s altered passage can be just as
readily performed.)
One of the hazards of the present undertaking is that,
despite considerable effort, the occasional unforeseen text
turns up in a library, often proving to be a different version
from all previously encountered publications of a piece.
(The rare intermediate versions of the Sonnambula and
Huguenots fantasies are cases in point.) Liszt’s first transcription
of Die Rose, along with the final version, appears
in the nine discs of Schubert transcriptions already
released as volumes 31 to 33 of this series. But a Richaut
edition of 1837/8 of a selection of the early Liszt transcriptions
of Schubert songs contains a version 7 which is
best described as a half-way house between the two, and is
included here by way of a pendant to the discs of song
transcriptions.
Jubelouvertüre 8 is, of course, a bona fide transcription
rather than an edition: Weber’s original work, his
Opus 59, dates from 1818, and was composed for the
Golden Jubilee of King Friedrich August I of Saxony, hence
the reference to the anthem Heil dir im Siegerkranz
(whose melody is that of God Save the Queen). Liszt’s
transcription, which was issued with his arrangements of
the overtures to Der Freischütz and Oberon (as Carl
Maria von Webers Ouvertüren—Clavier-Partitur von LISZT IN 1838
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