FRANZ LISZT : Soirées musicales (Leslie Howard) 2CD (1998) APE (image+.cue), lossless

Ferenc Liszt’s years of travel took him very often to Italy in the mid-1830s, and his response to the country and its music was a vast body of works, original and transcribed. His fantasies and transcriptions from Italian opera and song are complemented by original settings of Italian texts and many pieces inspired by Italian scenery or works of art and literature. So considerable is this body of work, and so deeply has Liszt imbibed the Italian spirit, that it would not be unreasonable to describe these works in toto as the greatest of nineteenth-century Italian keyboard music. It may even be that the very existence of Liszt’s Italian works daunted the native Italian composers, whose instrumental music of the time, with the honourable exceptions of Verdi’s mighty String Quartet and Rossini’s inexplicably neglected piano works, seldom rises above the second rank.
Italian opera played a large role in the shaping of Liszt’s melodic style, as we can observe in his youthful opera Don Sanche, the Opus 6 Études for piano, and the earliest of his songs. His operatic paraphrases pay homage to Bellini, Donizetti, Mercadante, Pacini, Rossini and Verdi, and the many other Italian transcriptions salute Bellini, Bononcini, Donizetti (and his brother Giuseppe), Lassus, Mercadante, Paganini, Palestrina, Peruchini, Pezzini, Rossini, Spontini, Tirindelli and Verdi, as well as folk melody—anonymous or the product of minor salon composers. Bocella and Petrarch were chosen for song texts, and the words of St Francis of Assisi led to the Cantico del Sol. The art of Dante, Michelangelo, Orcagna, Raphael, Salvator Rosa and Tasso inspired important orchestral and keyboard works. The praise of Venice, Naples and Rome is sung over and again, and to all this must be added the catalogue of works which revere the Italian saints and the Church of Rome, which reverence is at the very root of Liszt’s psyche. And, of course, Liszt spent a great deal of his later life in Italy, and might even be regarded as an Italian composer manqué were it not that similar cases can be made for him in respect of France, Germany and Hungary.

The works in the present collection are of three kinds: transcriptions from the liriche da camera of three famous Italians; original works derived from Liszt’s own songs; and free fantasies on melodies from a variety of sources.

Rossini’s Soirées musicales are a collection of vocal solos and duets with piano accompaniment to texts of Metastasio and Pepoli. From their publication in 1835 they immediately became concert favourites, and Liszt’s transcriptions are only some of the many that circulated widely throughout the nineteenth century. And their influence lingered into the twentieth century and the works of such composers as Britten and Respighi. For some reason, Liszt completely re-ordered the collection when he made his transcriptions, retaining only the first and last pieces in their original places. (Rossini’s original running order is 1, 5, 7, 11, 3, 6, 4, 9, 2, 8, 10 and 12.) Liszt’s method in his transcriptions is akin to that which he employed in his Lieder transcriptions: the original piano part is wedded to the vocal part(s) and further elaborated from time to time, but the shape of the original determines the form of the transcription. But many repeated passages are subject to a fecund variety of treatment—yet more examples of Liszt’s personal approach to variation technique. Strangely, these works are at present very difficult to acquire in score, and the most recent publications are full of errors: the Ricordi edition of ‘La Danza’ only retains misprints from their first edition over 150 years ago, and Schott’s edition was bowdlerised by Karl Klindworth who, apart from making suggestions for study, advised many alterations to Liszt’s text. The present recording was made from a collation of the original editions of Troupenas, Ricordi and Schott, with reference to the first edition of Rossini’s original.
More Notes of Leslie Howard