Liszt

Man, I wish I had the cojones that Liszt had. That dude spent hours on technique, screw school. Screw a job. He worked on his technique and the rest, as they say is history.

Major conjones.

Anyways, Liszt is probably best well known for his etudes which are obscenely difficult, mostly because he could play them to show off his…yup, you guessed it, cojones. The 12 Transcendental were re-written 3 times, and there are three published versions. Liszt himself got better at writing for the piano, so naturally, his pieces developed.  No. 10, interestingly one of the only 2 that Liszt did not title is marked allegro agitato molto.  Not one of the harder ones, but pretty popular, it deals with treating melody in octaves in the right hand with cramped spacing, left hand difficult figurations and other such gnarly things. In addition, the Paganini etudes are also famous, particularly La Campanella. If you have the Norton Recordings from survey, it’s Andre Watts playing. I hate it. I mean, he does some things well…but man. I just don’t like it. Anyways, its super famous. Everybody knows what it sounds like. Noteworthy is the fact that Liszt himself said that the LH octaves in the coda could be changed. He wasn’t “teaching enough” when he wrote that.

The sonata is a masssssssive work (like Liszt’s conojones!) that does a lot of cool things with Sonata Form and keys and such, but seeing as how last time I talked about form, I was ridiculed in another blog I will refrain this time. (You know, Sean, I thought this was a safe space, where I could talk about what I wanted without fear of judgment. I guess not.) The sonata has many cool historical anecdotes associated with it, and there are conflicting reports from many of Liszt’s own students about how to play the opening three G’s. Everyone who is anyone records this sonata and it’s absolutely beautiful. It is possibly programmatic, telling the story of Faust and Gretchen and Mephistopheles.  If not, it’s still clearly a struggle between light and dark. I love this piece, but I can’t find a recording that I like all the way through. Parts of one and parts of another and blah blah. I wish I could splice them together and submit it as my own…..but I don’t have the balls.

Liszt is also famous for doing what many composer/pianists did at the time and that is adapting the famous works of other well known composers to fit their concert billings. (Dude, can you imagine the cojones it takes to take Beethoven and Schubert and Chopin and make it “Better”….wow.) Liszt does this through his opera paraphrases and his song transcriptions. The song Auf dem Wasser zu singen is a Schubert song that Liszt treats nicely and the Reminiscences of Don Juan is a particularly coherent set. There is, in fact a duo piano arrangement. We should have the Grinell Artist duo team of Toha and Bell perform it in class one day. I’m sure they could use it on their performance resume. Apparentley, Scriabin hurt his hand playing this piece and wrote his funeral march for the first sonata in memory of his once perfect hand.

The Anees de Pelerinage is in three books. I’m waiting for the posting of the info from class before I go into any great detail. But most of the famous pieces of Lisz’ts come from here, including a beautiful!! Petrarch Sonett (104).  For these pieces, I definitely reccomend Alfred Brendel’s recordings of it. I don’t know why, but I really like them. Maybe I should listen for his priorities to see if they match with my own. But alas…no time. The only thing is that he only plays the first two books, with Zoltan coming in as relief pitcher and finishing up book 3. Speaking of cojones….closing for Brendel….thats a pair.

~ by rob9092 on February 10, 2009.