En rêve sound a bit neither here nor there to me! I remember trying one of the Consolations once, a long time ago, and gave up because I found it a bit tedious, but I'm willing to give these miniatures another go. O pourquoi donc seems the most rewarding piece to me. I'd like to have a stab at Un Sospiro one day, in the distant future, and if I ever feel I'm ready, I'll bypass Liszt's Transcendental Etudes entirely and go straight for Lyapunov's!

Really? Explore the Lyapunov if you wish -certainly decent enough music (though I think they often look more interesting on the printed page than they do in performance)- but IMO they have none of the genius of Liszt's etudes.

But you can always save the Liszt for another day!

I haven't read through either of the two sets of Etudes, but from just listening, a couple of the Lyapunov ones stood out including one that I like very much. The Liszt set however, I didn't find memorable from a listener's point of view. I will of course, do a selective read through one day, if ever I feel I am ready.

I consider the best Liszt TE's to be 3, and 9-12. I think that 10-12 especially reach heights rarely matched in the solo piano literature, as far as miniatures go. I'm not sure how familiar you are with them, but I might as well link them anyway. This thread is lacking most of the TE's!

Paysage



Ricordanza



Appassionato



Harmonies Du Soir



Chasse-Neige

You left out the best one.

Listening to some of the Transcendental Etudes again, I'm even more acutely aware of the fact that I don't get it. And I think I now get why I don't get it, and I think I don't get it for the same reason I don't get it when I hear jazz (should I run and duck?). It's the performance aspects of a lot of Liszt that I am talking about. It's the flamboyance, the rhetorical gestures and flourishes which draw attention to themselves and to the performer.

I've been listening to Liszt in the wrong setting. I think I'd get it if I were to listen to him played live, especially by a flamboyant pianist (like Lang Lang? ) I might still not not enjoy what I hear the way I'd enjoy Schumann, Brahms (yes I'm firmly in the Leipzig-Berlin rather than the Weimar camp), Chopin or Schubert, but I think I'd get it.

Incidentally, the one time I remember hearing Liszt played live was thanks to a pianist who got a lot of flak from reviewers for being 'reserved' in his interpretation of Liszt. When I interviewed him, he scoffed at his critics and said he wanted to bring out the 'spiritual' side of the composer and made it a point of putting stuff like the Petrarchan Sonnets (I didn't get those either!) on the programme.

Anyway, I intend to have a fair stab at the first book of the Années. They look rewarding enough. One day in the distant future, I might have a go at some of the more showy and technically demaqnding pieces and maybe then, I'd get it.

That's understandable However I do disagree with a couple of your points - i'm of the belief that in the best of Liszt, if you are listening to the 'rhetorical gestures and flourishes' and feel they are 'drawing attention to themselves and the performer,' you are listening wrong. There is a lot of Liszt where what you describe certainly applies, but I fail to see it in the Trans etudes I listed. They use a virtuosic language like a lot of Liszt - but for a musical rather than athletic purpose. That virtuosic language can be difficult to get used to and probably isn't for everyone, so I understand your analysis.

I don't mean to push too much on you, i'm just curious. What do you think of late Liszt? Say, this piece?



Incidentally, you could play that one.

Regardless, I hope you find joy in learning pieces from the Annees!

This is amazing!

I discovered this work yesterday. Does anyone know about it? I found some information about it, apparently it was composed for the 20th anniversary of Chopin's death.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnjauJquWfw&feature=relmfu

I've heard it twice before - and don't have much time to listen again at the moment. It struck me as a really interesting, if not wholly satisfying work back then. Then again, I never got close to understanding it (I didn't have any notes about the work, and Liszt as always is highly programmatic, symbolic, etc). Certainly a different side to Liszt than the music which he is usually associated with!

Thanks for the link - this is a work I need to revisit.

Thanks, and no, I would not be able to play that one! The technical demands might be modest enough for me, but in order to be able to play it with any degree of conviction, I think I'd need to study more Liszt first. It is musically rather challenging.

Good response.

Today I started to transcendental etude no. 1

such a nice piece Thank you Liszt.

I'd say that Liszt is quite possibly the best pianist to ever live. It's such a horrific shame that he didn't live into the age in which he could have been recorded...

Three more discoveries...

Excelsior! Preludio to the Cantata "The Bells of Strasbourg Cathedral" (Personally, despite the praise by Alan Walker on the piece, the actual Cantata hasn't reached me. However, this prelude is glorious in that Mahlerian, mind-blowing sort of way).



Cantantibus Organis.



Der nächtliche Zug. (The first piece from the Two Episodes from Lenau's Faust - the other being the first Mephisto Waltz. This is one of his better orchestral works, written a little later than most of the tone poems and the symphonies. It employs superior, more imaginative orchestration. As does the Mephisto Waltz No. 1. in its orchestral form).

I won't deny that they're attention drawing, but I like to think of a lot of these short Liszt pieces as being FUN for the audience and performer. Well, for the performer I guess it's not that fun performing if you don't have it 100% solid lol. Liszt is really great to listen to in my opinion, it's hard to grow tired of!

These are perhaps terrible oversimplifications and generalizations that aren't accurate but I think Chopin/Liszt write relatively simple music in the sense that you immediately connect with it. (I guess we can throw a lot of composers into this category) Chopin's I tend to think of as being "pretty", while Liszt's music is grander and often times embodies more emotion (sorry Chopin fans :P).

The reason I say this is when I play Chopin I find myself thinking about how to optimize the "pretty" factor. I think of it as trying to immerse myself in the music, it sounds so nice I want more. With Liszt, I feel like I'm pulled into it, and I feel all of it. Sorry this is terribly vague and possibly makes no sense, but with Liszt I feel like it's really easy to just let go, and do what you feel like is right. His flamboyant and grand passages are very intuitive for some reason.

I've performed the 10th Transcendental Etude a lot of times, and I think while the audience is wowed by the excessive arm movement, the intensity is something everyone can always feel. To throw more useless metaphors out there, Liszt has a certain strong flavor to his music. The spirit is sorta like Rachmaninoff (although Rachmaninoff usually has a lot of other stuff going on underneath the surface whereas Liszt doesn't), but more "focused".

Anyways, you can probably tell by now I'm not much good at this writing/language business, but it's been a while since I've touched any new Liszt, progress has been a bit slow this past year since I have been slacking. I casually learned Chasse neige about a year ago but I forgot how to play it, another really FUN piece, it just feels so good pounding out that melody with so much muscle power.

My favorite Liszt piece is probably the Sonata, I should learn it someday...I love the 2nd Ballade too, it's not that hard technically but it's so mature and absolutely priceless. Hopefully I'll get around to a few more Transcendental Etudes, Mazeppa looks like fun. Currently tied up with Scriabin, looking into killing myself via Medtner, hopefully I live to play some more Liszt

Oh I just remembered, I got a Guiseppe Andaloro CD with some Elegies, the Grosses Konzertsolo and the 4 Mephisto Valses. I think most people aren't aware that there's more than 1 Mephisto Valse, the other 3 are really great though! I like the Grosses Konzertsolo a lot, though I don't think I'd want to learn it for some reason.

Great interview, and simply sublime playing...

I can't stop thinking about Liszt! I think about him and I have the same kind of feelings as when I think about a woman with whom I have been in love. Is this normal? Am I the only one in love with Liszt?!



I was playing this one last night, and this music brought to mind direct images of this aforementioned woman, and now Liszt is just as real as her.

I think you win the PC Liszt appreciation award for this post

Now I'm curious... although this isn't Psychology Corner and I am not sure if we discuss such things! Is this a case of sublimation or what? Transferral? Isn't transferral when you fall in love with someone closely associated with the person you are actually in love with? Can you fall in love with a composer who is not actually living? What about Jeremy Denk and his blog entry about Schumann as a living, metaphysical presence in his imagination? It was only the idea of Schumann though... (well yes, I suppose if Denk was seeing the real flesh-and-blood Schumann, that would make for a genuinely troubling blog entry...)

Or is this all about how *cute* Liszt was...

Interesting... Liszt is really cute!

I really like the "other" Mephistos a great deal, but they are late works that sound like they were written by someone else than the person who wrote the first one. And that late Liszt stuff is pretty rough going for many people - I can well imagine the shocked bewilderment of someone encountering those late Mephisto waltzes for the first time, if all they knew was the first one and some of the more popular Liszt pieces. It's a whole different world.

They are remarkable. The second is perhaps my favourite of the lot. The Mephisto's and the other diabolical works he wrote, like the Csardas Macabre, are among my favourite works by him. He has a terrific output of diabolical music.

For a long time it was a tie between 1 and 2, but lately I've come to feel that the 1st is the more varied and overall best written. The 3rd has some great material, but with due respect, it seems ever so slightly stretched.

As for the Csardas Macabre, I wish I could love it. The piece starts out so promisingly with those open 5ths -and Liszt builds to a nice bloody climax- but the piece so utterly overstays its welcome and eventually falls victim to plain tedium. I realize that most of Liszt's late works are unedited and often little more than sketches, but it's all the more of a pity that Liszt didn't revisit the Csardas and prune it down to something far more cogent.

IMO of course.

Why belittle honest feelings like this?

I also love Liszt. His willingness to open his soul into composition is unmatched. This alone makes it easy to fall in love with the spirit behind the work. Add in his lifelong charity, years of work improving musical education, technical innovations...need I go on?

Music transcends other art forms precisely due its brainwave carrier capability. Some composers purposely created pretty music - and that's fine. I appreciate them and their music but that's it. Those who wrote for more interesting reasons - aren't they whom we tend to love? (Even if we don't often admit so for fear of being accused of "cuteness" bias.)

P.S. How can anyone listen to the music posted on this thread and not fall in love with Liszt?

Maybe because love is the most subjective of emotions?

Belittle?? No way! Good grief... Tongue in cheek, maybe, but it seemed like a rare & fascinating post and I didn't want it to slide into oblivion unanswered. Or maybe I misread the lack of answers-- maybe it was a respectful silence. Oh, who the heck knows what is going on out there in that vast cauldron of anonymity that is PC. Here was someone being very personal, and I answered, maybe should have left out the slew of questions. But I think the relationship between musicians, the music they play and the composers they love, is complex and fascinating and is quite sturdy enough to take some (well meaning) scrutinizing!!

I so agree! I find the Pianist Corner fascinating precisely because of the extremely personal opinions. Love and hate make perfect sense in an artistic context.

Don't you find it a tiny bit troublesome that so many of us have been taught to fear an honest emotional response? Why the need to deconstruct the magic of individuality into "the scientific answer"? .

I find the stereotypical "Bach* transcends Liszt because the former's resonant frequencies and complex enharmonic partials** reverberate in a superior manner" faction an oddly driven contingent. Their discussions seem as fundamentally eccentric as a Van Gogh connoisseur insisting his artist is superior to previous competitors due to his use of cobalt over Prussian blue. It may be an interesting point, but is it relevant to an appreciation of the art?

Bravo to the Franz Liszt appreciation thread! May he live on in our hearts forever. Bravo to all pianists, be they Liszt-maniacs or not!

*Insert any composer
**Insert any scientific "proof" of superiority

I've pretty well learned Consolations 1-4, now... and my god; these works are absoloute gems - so much Liszt, and so much humanity in such a small package.

I remember the first time my teacher played me the second of the Petrarch Sonnets. I think I went into a swoon. Here was music of such manly passion (I'm not being sexist, now), no mushy puppy-love!

Indeed. One of the supreme romantic-era solo-piano miniatures.

According to Leslie Howard, the now famous Consolation #3 in D flat was put in place of another piece that was originally there, in C# minor. It apparently eventually found itself into the opening of the first Hungarian Rhapsody.



Interesting stuff! It's a very Chopin-esque melody, it reminds me of one of the Nocturnes. I wonder why Liszt changed it?