FRANZ LISZT : The Schubert Transcriptions III (Leslie Howard) (1998) 3CD / APE (image+.cue), lossless

This final 3-CD set of Liszt’s Schubert transcriptions presents the remaining important collection, the Zwölf Lieder, the revised or alternative versions of the transcriptions from the three song cycles, other revised transcriptions, and one further song, Lob der Tränen. The background information to many of the pieces recorded here has already been given upon the occasion of each work’s first appearance in this series, and it is hoped that those good listeners who have ventured to acquaint themselves with this third collection will permit their attention to be drawn to the contents and notes of the two previously-issued volumes, 31 and 32.
The genesis of Liszt’s earlier transcriptions of Schubert Lieder is a major research area in itself, and it is very difficult to be absolutely certain that, when Liszt had a piece issued in different cities by different publishers, he did not permit himself some alteration to the musical text. There is no area more problematic than that of the Zwölf Lieder (‘Twelve Songs’), S558. Before these pieces were collected and issued as a set, quite a few of them had been published, sometimes in different forms, and in collections of some diversity in content and number, depending on the original publisher. Certainly, the earliest publications of Erlkönig, Ave Maria, Frühlingsglaube and Meeresstille differ from those in the set of twelve. These versions are included elsewhere in the present series of nine discs.

As usual, Liszt planned the tonal structure of the set with great care: the pieces are in B flat major, A flat major, E flat major, G minor, C major, F minor/F major, A flat major, D minor, B flat major, E major, C sharp minor/E major, B flat major. The tonal jolts of a tritone occur at the points of greatest unrest in the poetry—Gretchen am Spinnrade and Rastlose Liebe, and, as a resolution after rejection, Ave Maria. Schubert’s original keys are retained with the single exception of the Ständchen von Shakespeare, which Schubert set in C major.
More Notes of Leslie Howard