FRANZ LISZT : Liszt at the Opera (Leslie Howard) 2CD (1998) FLAC (image+.cue), lossless

Although Liszt only completed one opera Don Sanche—and that at the age of thirteen—his preoccupation with the dissemination and performance of opera occupied him much of his professional life, whether as a conductor/producer (about which volumes could be written for his championship of works regarded at the time as ‘difficult’) or as a pianist/composer. Apart from his youthful work, Liszt made only sketches, during his most prolific period whilst at Weimar, for various operatic projects which came to nothing—although the most significant attempt, Sardanapale, after Byron, runs to 111 pages. The only near-opera which Liszt completed was his oratorio The Legend of Saint Elizabeth, which was successfully staged as an opera, against Liszt’s wishes and without his attendance, at Weimar in 1881, and it enjoyed a modest career in this form for half a century.
Since in its day the piano work based upon operatic themes was of considerable importance, and since the genre seems to have returned to favour, having been somewhat neglected by the musically short-sighted for the greater part of the twentieth century, a word is due here in praise of Liszt’s achievement in elevating this art to a height which has not been surpassed and very seldom approached by other composers. Many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century keyboard virtuosi produced music in all kinds of structures with the common starting point of music from (usually other composers’) operas. To be able to improvise upon popular arias was an essential part of the early pianist’s repertoire, and certainly Mozart and Beethoven both excelled at it. Many formal sets of operatic variations were published, and again Mozart and Beethoven feature prominently. But the large-scale fantasy or paraphrase really came into its own in the nineteenth century and, with best respects to Thalberg, and even to Chopin, it was Liszt who brought the genre to its apogee. The aims of the sixty or so piano works which Liszt based on operas were many: the propagation of the deserving but unknown; pre- or post-theatre familiarising of an audience with the material; the challenge of a new form akin to, but different from, variation; the sedulous imitation of voices and orchestra at the keyboard and the encapsulation in a relatively small work of the dramatic ambit of a much larger one, all play their part. Sometimes Liszt makes a bar-for-bar transcription, as with the overtures by Rossini, Wagner or Weber, or he makes a looser paraphrase of a particular number or section (The Flying Dutchman, Aida, Eugene Onegin, Lucia di Lammermoor) in which his keyboard skills make one forget the original medium, even if Liszt’s contribution as an original composer is relatively small. In the largest and finest of the fantasies, such as Don Giovanni or Norma, he actually sheds new light upon the originals, and one can only regret that his interest in opera composition was stifled by his very enthusiasm for other men’s work.

In his transcription of the Freischütz overture, Liszt works in much the same manner in which he transcribed the Beethoven symphonies: the music is faithfully notated, but sometimes the actual notes are somewhat rearranged in order better to produce something like the effect of the original instrumentation. In this kind of transcription Liszt always gives alternative versions in those passages which might be thought to have exceeded their brief in search of a good pianistic response to orchestral colour, but on the whole the more daring alternative is the more musically compelling.
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