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Recently I had to substitute for a math teacher at the local midle school. Inbetween classes, I went to the library and stumbled across "The Lives Of The Great Composers" by Harold Schoenberg. Having a copy os his book "The Great Pianists" from the late 1980s, I decided to read thru it...particulary about my favorite piano composer Chopin and my favorite 19th-century pianist Liszt.

Sitting there reading mad think that I had not listened to any of my Liszt collection in some time...so I decided to solve that problem today. I don't have much of his piano music...just the two piano concertos and the various etude collection he wrote. Which brings me to this question:

Somewhere in the "The Great Pianists" there is a mention that the pieces collectively called "The 12 Transcendental Etudes" (of which I have a recording of by Claudio Arrau) were themselves a simplified version of another group of etudes.

So, what was this previous version called? Are there any recordings of it? Since I am not much of a technical wiz on the piano, such pieces are far beyond anything I could hope to do...just getting thru the books A-G in the John Schaum's lessons nearly killed me. I would like to hear these more difficult pieces...although I don't see how they could possibly be any more difficult than the Trascendental ones.

I've not heard about this before, but I punched it into Google:

"The Transcendental Etudes S. 139 began in 1826, as a set of youthful and far less technically demanding exercises called the Étude en douze exercices (Study in twelve exercises) S. 136. Liszt then elaborated on these pieces considerably, and the far more technically difficult exercises called the Douze Grandes Études (Twelve Great Studies) S. 137 were then published in 1837.

The Transcendental Etudes S. 139 are revisions of his Douze Grandes Etudes. As the third and final version, this set was published in 1852 and dedicated to Carl Czerny, Liszt’s piano teacher, and himself a prolific composer of etudes. The set included simplifications, for the most part; in addition to many other reductions, Liszt removed all stretches of greater than a tenth, making the piece more suitable for pianists with smaller hands and less technical skill. However, the fourth etude of the final set, Mazeppa, is actually more demanding than its 1837 version, since it very frequently alters and crosses the hand to create a “galloping” effect."

I'm guessing these are not to be confused with the Grand Paganini Etude (which are more like super-hard transcriptions of Paganini then anything(La Campanella is in this set))

Here is #4 from the Grand Etudes
[video:youtube]v_oOQ1eDaso[/video]

and by comparison, #4 from the Transcendental Etudes
[video:youtube]dOqRn2KkADw[/video]

Note that they both focus on the same Idea/technique(Playing outer-inner voices separately?) But the Transcendental Etude is set out in a more simple way, to show a clear distinction between the Voices (He puts it on 3 staves rather than two). He also adds a small introduction to the beginning of the Transcendental. Although, according to Wikipedia, the Transcendental one in this case is harder?

Ok...I am familiar with the Paganni etudes. So I need to find a recording of these "previous" versions of the 12 TE. I poked around a little and found one (I hope it is the correct one!) by a guy named Leslie Howard.