![]() An early version has the added beauty of the soprano voice, and the later solo piano variant is a fine virtuoso piece. It is marked by brief, pregnant phrases, with much note repetition, sighs, highly emotive gestures, forms of instrumental recitative. On the theme of love's anxieties, he produced several versions for male or female voice, and as a piano solo. ![]() This was completed by the age of twenty-five, with impressionistic pieces such as The Bells of Geneva.Ĭlearly written by the composer of that Liebestraum, the impassioned Petrarch Sonnet No 104 is a piece he revised with much care over the years. He led the way in piano music inspired by artistic and literary themes, an approach new for the mid-1830s, leading to Years of Pilgrimage, Year I, Switzerland. Chopin was not inclined to return the compliments about Liszt's creativity.īeing born at a time of the greatest change in music, Liszt was quick to discover what lay beyond, moving away from traditional forms. Great composers were not known to pay this kind of compliment, but Liszt was very generous towards others. Liszt admired him greatly but did not imitate when Chopin died young, Liszt used some of his valuable time to write a book about him. The Consolation No 3 has some melodic similarity, but none of that ecstatic feeling, and is nearer to Chopin's style. Yet Liszt did not choose to repeat his popular successes. His Liebestraum No 3 was once probably the best known love song in Western Europe, thought to be the very idealisation of love. As both men were unusually gaunt, the tag of diabolism was often attached to both by way of explaining their expertise. He would make the piano rival the violin in speed of note repetition with breath-taking effect. In particular, he was the first of many Romantics including Brahms and Rachmaninov to be fascinated by the melodic potential of Paganini's Caprice No 24. Paganini's compositions were of their kind uniquely difficult to play, and Liszt spent much time transcribing them. ![]() That at least was the witness of a journalist he had probably bribed. Paganini's skills were such that once when he played on just one string, the Devil was alongside giving a helping hand. His witnessing the first world-famous violinist Paganini was a decisive event as he determined to work hard enough to become a great virtuoso. He never mastered the language, but was proud of being thought Hungarian.Ī portrait by Julius Ludwig Sebbers of Franz Liszt's mother, Maria Anna Lagerīy adolescence, he was living in Paris thanks to prodigious talent at the piano. His father worked on the Esterhazy estate which had been linked with a major phase in Haydn's career, on the other side of the Austro-Hungarian border when that was not a political frontier. ![]() It was from childhood memories of them that Franz Liszt's work on their music originated, and his later art song, The Three Gipsies, is a moving tribute to their culture. His skills in transcribing them were such that on hearing the orchestral version of the one numbered two, one might think it unplayable on the piano. How much was original gipsy music is less important than the fact it gave him a fund of beautiful melodies and exciting rhythms. Liszt relied on music popular in the towns as performed mainly by gipsies, who had often embellished the material. Scientific research into such areas of folklore did not exist in Liszt's time, so the precise music of the Hungarian peasants would have to wait two more generations for its annotation through musicologists. The first page of Homer Bartlett's 1910 edition of Liszt's 'Hungarian Rhapsody No 2' for the University Society Inc. They were unlike anything ever heard on a solo piano, technically astounding, rising in the style of a czardas, from a relaxed tempo to the wildest exhilaration. The strings are struck or plucked.Ī few of the first fifteen transcriptions, or at least one, has become overplayed because of its excessive popularity, obscuring most of the others. In their day, those rhapsodies must have been of immense originality since then, they have carried the fame of Hungarian music from end to end of the world.Ī top view of a modern concert cimbalom, showing the playing area. all the effects of a gipsy band, with extraordinary success. The tapping and rattling of the cimbalom is embodied in Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies, equally with the chorus of violins and the solos of its leader. Sacheverell Sitwell (1897-1988), in his biography of Franz Liszt (1811-86), wrote: The Hungarian cimbalom is a gong-like dulcimer in folk bands, with clarinet and strings.
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