FRANZ LISZT : Fantasies, paraphrases and transcriptions of National Songs and Anthems (Leslie Howard) (1998) APE (image+.cue), lossless

Liszt’s cosmopolitan and gregarious social bearing ensured that, apart from one or two early scandalous moments, he was accepted and honoured in all of the countries in which he travelled and lived. So, although he was unutterably proud of being Hungarian, he was not particularly viewed as a foreigner anywhere. The Germans referred to him as Franz, to the French he was always known as François, to the Hungarians as Ferenc, to the Italians as Francesco, and to the Vatican, in strict accordance with his birth register, as Franciscus. However, in England, for some xenophobic reason no doubt, he was never called Francis. (And yet English publishers were very keen to promote the works of one John S Bach for years.) The first editions of his works bear all of these names in a bewildering variety of spellings. (Liszt himself always signed his name as ‘FL’ or ‘FLiszt’—without punctuation, even in letters to his children.)
In his years of travel Liszt was frequently obliged to improvise on themes suggested to him by members of his audience, and so, apart from popular operatic arias of the day, some of the most likely requests were national favourites, if not indeed the very anthems, of the country in which he found himself. Unfortunately, not all of these improvisations came to be notated and published, although there is always the possibility that more will turn up (there are persistent rumours about a piece based on ‘Rule, Britannia’, for example). The pieces in the present collection are by no means the whole of Liszt’s surviving production in this field. The Hungarian pieces form a literature of their own, and various French, German, Swiss, Spanish and Russian melodies appear in other volumes in this project—but they do include all the actual national anthem paraphrases. (Apart from odd ‘Album Leaves’, the other works of this kind not included in the present programme are the Five Hungarian Folk Songs and A Puszta Keserve (recorded in Vol 12), Faribolo pastour, Chanson du Béarn, Fantaisie romantique sur deux mélodies suisses and other Swiss pieces (in Vol 20), the Magyar Dalok and Magyar Rapszódiák (Vol 29), the Rapsodies hongroises, the Chanson bohémienne, the Gaudeamus igitur pieces and the Spanish works.)
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