I've recently discovered Liszt's transcriptions of Beethoven's 9th symphony. How hard is that piece to play do you think? Is this at the level of crazy intense focus for a year kind of piece?

Why would you want to do this? It was written in the era before recordings, so if you wanted to hear it and nobody else was performing it, you had to play it yourself. Nowadays, you just pop a CD into the player.

If you want to play it to show that your technique is much better than your taste and musical understanding, there's plenty of other, better music available for that.

If you want to play it to better learn about Beethoven's 9th, go ahead, but I wouldn't spend too much effort on it. There are other transcriptions of it, but if you really want to learn it, you might as well read it directly from the score.

Liszt completed his solo transcription of the 9th only reluctantly, and it's likely that he never thought it a success. If you want to experience the 9th first hand, then his 2-piano transcription is ideal.

I highly recommend looking into 1-8 as transcribed by Liszt. They're wonderful works of art in their own right. There are so many reasons to study and learn what you can of these transcriptions - alongside the score and recordings, of course - that the undertaking is well worthwhile.

I'm inclinded to agree with BDB on this one; it's an awful lot of time and effort to put into a work that you might have little opportunity of performing, and it's Liszt's pianistic interpretation of orchestral Beethoven, a very mixed bag. All very well, I suppose, if you need a major "transcription" in your repertoire, but there are so many other good transcriptions in the literature to say nothing of many better original solo works for piano.

Regards,