FRANZ LISZT : Complete Piano Music (Leslie Howard) 99CD (1998) FLAC / APE (tracks, image+.cue), lossless

Leslie Howard’s recording of Liszt’s complete piano music, on 99 CDs, is one of the monumental achievements in the history of recorded music. Remarkable as much for its musicological research and scholarly rigour as for Howard’s Herculean piano playing, this survey is invaluable to serious lovers of Liszt.

Every known note of Liszt’s piano music has been recorded and is included here: Leslie Howard’s 57 original volumes plus the further 3 supplements.

GUINNESS WORLD RECORD for the world’s largest recording series by a solo artist.

FRANZ LISZT : Waltzes (Leslie Howard) (1998) APE (image+.cue), lossless

Aside from juvenilia, a few album-leaves, early versions and works based upon other composers’ music, these works represent the complete original concert waltzes for piano by Liszt. The Ländler and Albumblatt are given by way of encores. The third of the Trois Valses-Caprices, S214, is based on themes by Donizetti (Leslie Howard has recorded it for Hyperion on ‘Rare Piano Encores’, CDH55109). The Bagatelle without tonality was originally to have been the Fourth Mephisto Waltz. The Petite Valse favorite is omitted since it is merely an earlier version of the Valse-Impromptu. Two recently-published additions to the Mephisto Waltz No 1 are included here. Liszt left three pages of sketches for an Andantino he wished to add to the Mephisto Waltz No 4. Leslie Howard completed the piece in 1978 for the Liszt-Bartók cycle at La Scala, Milan, and this version, which is dedicated to Alfred Brendel, is published by Basil Ramsey.
We are accustomed to look benignly upon the shortcomings of the great: if Johann Sebastian Bach should write such a clumsy fugue as the example in the B flat Capriccio we are amused rather than concerned at the, genius’s early struggles. But we are less charitable when confronted with achievement of less predictable quality; longueur, banality and technical error even in so great a man as Schubert have not been exempt from unsympathetic criticism. In Liszt’s case we have acquired, in the century since his death, a complete critical mythology which has successfully prevented the investigation and performance of many of his finest works. Anyone who is pushing back creative frontiers in a prodigious output and over a long life is bound to produce an uneven body of work where sometimes a sense of experiment outweighs one of achievement. Yet, despite the enormous quantity of the Liszt œuvre—well over a thousand pieces—there is remarkably little without interest. In order to comprehend and eventually pardon Liszt’s imperfections the critical mythology must be attacked. That Liszt was a powerful character and an influential man is beyond dispute. That younger composers from Smetana and Glazunov to Grieg and Macdowell and older contemporaries like Schumann, Berlioz and Wagner asked and received Liszt’s assistance is testimony to esteem for the man’s music as much as for his generosity. That Liszt propagated the works of other composers old and new by means of piano transcriptions or fantasies need offend no-one—the overtly audience-slaying nature of a number of these works is not, in any case, an essentially unpleasant phenomenon. That Liszt’s character was so multi-faceted as to reflect itself in an enormous range of styles is at once an advantage and a defect. But the present writer for one would rather have a hero who tried and didn’t always succeed than one who took the eternal safe option. It is essential to respect the sincerity of Liszt’s aims: the flatulent and intellectually pusillanimous epithets ‘Mephistopheles disguised as a priest’, ‘Virtuoso, Prophet, Charlatan’, ‘Thunder, Lightning, Mesmerism, Sex’ or ‘The Tragi-Comedy of a Soul divided against itself’ (Ernest Newman at his most miserable) are, at the most charitable, corrosive barnacles of half-truth and small help to the listener. The conflict between the spiritual and the material is as germane to art as it is to life, and if Liszt’s nobler aspirations are occasionally tainted with saccharine, or his worldlier offerings sometimes afflicted with a serious overdose of rhetoric, there seems no need to accuse him of posturing in order to explain his lapses from greatness.
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FRANZ LISZT : Ballades, Legends & Polonaises (Leslie Howard) (1998) APE (image+.cue), lossless

This series of recordings of Liszt’s complete piano music began in the Liszt anniversary year 1986 with the complete waltzes. Liszt’s admiration for, but essential difference from, Chopin was remarked in the notes to that recording, and in this second collection, whose titles also bear resemblance to Chopin, it is once again Liszt’s originality which shines through, no matter what degree of homage is intended to Chopin’s models.
Among the sillier notions of our time is a theory, propounded by a number of writers on music who will be glad to have their anonymity preserved here, that Liszt stood in awe of Chopin’s musical forms and felt unable to express himself in them until after Chopin’s death, when he immersed himself in almost all of them. A few minutes’ inspection of the relevant dates shows a certain amount of plain error, and even a quick look at the music suffices to show that, whatever the inspiration, Liszt’s aims were at once totally different. It just happens that Liszt’s retirement from the life of the travelling virtuoso took place only a year or so before Chopin’s death and, for all the music Liszt had written previously, he now devoted himself to correcting earlier works, developing unfinished projects and striking out into new musical forms. And in between these supposed Chopin obsequies Liszt produced the final versions of fifteen Hungarian Rhapsodies, two books of Années de pèlerinage, the Transcendental Studies, the Paganini Studies, the Sonata, several symphonic poems and much besides. Meanwhile he conducted several seasons of opera, including three of Wagner’s. So the idea of brooding at length over his departed quondam friend and releasing his debt in music of Chopinesque titles remains a barrier to comprehension.

There is no explanation for the absence of the subtitle to the First Ballade from all editions apart from the Paris edition of 1849 and the Neue Liszt-Ausgabe of 1981. Nor is there any specific reference by Liszt as to the source of that title. We can only assume that, as in so much of Liszt’s music, there is an underlying narrative structure behind the musical one. The introduction alternates two phrases, the first of which is a clear reference to the beginning of Chopin’s First Ballade! The second is a delicate scherzo-like motif, and both imply a key of D major, soon to be confounded by the arrival of the Crusader’s Song proper, in D flat. The piece unfolds as a set of variations punctuated by a middle section—a kind of joyful march, replete with risky gestures of rapid scales between the phrases. This is an altogether happy and uncomplicated work, inexplicably neglected in the concert hall.
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FRANZ LISZT : Konzertsolo & Odes funèbres (Leslie Howard) (1998) APE (image+.cue), lossless

This third release in the series of Liszt’s complete piano music contains a mixture of the known and the unknown, and comprises some of Liszt’s forays into larger forms (others are the Sonata, the Scherzo and March and the transcriptions). The first obvious feature is that Liszt never repeated a formal structure—and this applies equally well to the shorter piano works, and certainly to the orchestral, choral and chamber music. His search for new forms was constant and, while the Sonata and the ‘Faust’ Symphony may be his finest resolutions of the quest, his solutions are always of interest for their very variety of invention.
The old Kapellmeister from Eisenach was the first to use his name as the basis of a musical theme, and a great many of his later admirers have found his example irresistible. The theme itself (B flat–A–C–B natural) has an appealing symmetry which made it useful alike to Schumann, Liszt, Brahms, Reger and Webern, to name but a few. Liszt’s great Fantasy and Fugue is as much a pioneering product of the then avant-garde as it is a homage to Bach, and the intense chromaticism frequently makes us lose all sight of tonality, although the work basically revolves around G minor and B flat major. As is well known, the piece was originally composed for the organ, probably based on one of Liszt’s own improvisations. But there is nothing haphazard about the final form of the work, and the Fugue contains a good many contrapuntal and harmonic subtleties. The might of the piece’s dramatic argument has always kept it among Liszt’s most popular works, even if more in the organ world than that of the piano. The original version for organ (entitled Präludium und Fuge) dates from 1856 and was arranged for piano in 1870. In 1871 Liszt issued revised versions for both instruments under the present title.
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FRANZ LISZT : Transcendental Studies (Leslie Howard) (1998) APE (image+.cue), lossless

Pianists can count themselves very lucky, compared with most other instrumentalists, that the music devoted to the development of their performing technique has been provided largely by a group of composers whose pedigrees are beyond criticism. Cellists have to contend with the likes of Piatti, violinists have the honourable exception of Paganini in an otherwise undistinguished list, and wind and brass players have to work through unbelievably unmusical exercises. The best of piano studies, and there is very little reason why pianists should ever play less than the best studies, are written by composers whose overriding duty is to produce good music, with the technical instruction matched by the possibilities for musical development. So ‘studies’ by Chopin, Liszt, Alkan, Busoni, Bartók, Rachmaninov, Prokofiev, Scriabin, Stravinsky, Glazunov, Lyapunov, Lutosl/awski, MacDowell, Heller, Szymanowski, Dohnányi, Mendelssohn, Henselt, Rubinstein, Smetana, Debussy or Moszkowski are of the highest musical quality, whilst they exploit various technical problems with varying degrees of relentlessness. For example, where Chopin frequently derives a whole study from one particular technical point, most of Liszt’s are expanded works which require changes of texture to sustain the larger structures.
The history of the Transcendental Studies is tolerably well known, but may be briefly recapitulated here. In 1826, not yet fifteen years of age, the young prodigy published the first instalment of what promised to be an ‘Étude en 48 exercises’ in which Liszt intended to run twice through all the keys in the pattern C major, A minor, F major, D minor, etc, and the volume included twelve short studies of considerable flair, somewhat under the influence of his teacher Czerny (whose many studies are not quite of the calibre of the others mentioned above, however useful for younger players!) but showing much melodic invention and technical skill. (The remaining thirty-six were never composed, so the set of keys used remains within the flat side of the circle of fifths. Interestingly, Lyapunov’s twelve Transcendental Studies, written in Liszt’s memory, complete the cycle of keys.) In 1837, at the height of his Glanzperiode, Liszt took these little pieces (variously published as opus 1 or opus 6) and developed a formidable set of studies which, as Schumann noted in his laudatory review, were probably too difficult for anyone other than Liszt to play musically. The essential musical poetry of the pieces was rescued by Liszt from the more extreme technical demands in the final version published in 1852, in which the pieces become by no means easy, but much clearer in musical intent. The D flat study of the 1826 version never reappeared, but was replaced by the original E flat study transposed and much extended. The E flat study in the 1837 set is, therefore, new, but uses a fragment from the introduction to Liszt’s early Impromptu on themes of Rossini and Spontini, opus 3. The D minor study was reissued some time before the final version, with the title Mazeppa and a dedication to Victor Hugo. In the final version, titles are appended to ten of the pieces. Of course these titles are only guides for performance rather than clues to the sources for Liszt’s inspiration, but they are evocative enough, and often uncannily paraphrase the atmosphere conjured up by the music. The second and third versions of these studies both bear a dedication to Czerny. Liszt exploits every then-known device of piano technique in a set of original structures in which the dramatic argument is often heightened by harmonic tensions and juxtapositions very daring for their day.
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FRANZ LISZT : Saint-Saëns, Chopin & Berlioz Transcriptions (Leslie Howard) (1998) FLAC (image+.cue), lossless

The art and morality of the transcription was a hotly disputed question until very recent times; a climate of artificial purity in concert programming conveniently ignored the historical fact that virtually every Western composer since Pérotin has felt the necessity to use other men’s music, either to change the musical forces employed or to alter, embroider or vary the original material. Sense has prevailed, and even some of the more outrageous potboilers in the demi-monde of the virtuoso salon encore have gained perhaps even greater respectability in revival than they actually had as the Gebrauchsmusik of their day.
No composer can ever have done more in the business of transcription than Liszt. Hundreds of piano pieces generically entitled transcriptions, paraphrases or fantasies fell from his pen over a period of more than fifty years. The degree of Liszt’s participation varies from that of the ‘conscientious engraver’, as he wrote himself in the preface to his Beethoven Symphonies, to that of the composer who merely uses a pre-existing theme to generate an almost entirely new work. Naturally there are many intermediate varieties, and this first recording of transcriptions (and we shall continue to use that term for the sake of convenience) in the present series shows a broad range of Liszt’s methods.

Saint-Saëns was a fervent disciple of Liszt, and the older man showed his customary generosity to the younger by championing his music—Liszt arranged for Samson et Dalila to be staged at Weimar, for example—and Saint-Saëns introduced much of Liszt’s orchestral music to French audiences for the first time. Liszt dedicated his Second Mephisto Waltz to Saint-Saëns, who wrote his Third Symphony for Liszt, eventually inscribing it to his memory. Saint-Saëns was among the earliest followers of Liszt to compose a symphonic poem, and the Danse macabre is perhaps the best-known of his four works in the genre. Liszt’s transcription extends the original at many points, usually to accentuate the macabre elements and, memorably, to extend the lyrical central section which is rather short in the original. The loss of orchestral colour is more than compensated for by the breadth of variety in the palette of Liszt’s piano writing.
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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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FRANZ LISZT : Harmonies poétiques et religieuses (Leslie Howard) 2CD (1998) FLAC (image+.cue), lossless

The abbé Liszt has always been a familiar figure. Even though Liszt took only the four minor orders in 1865, and thus never became a priest (although he was later made Canon of Albano), his preoccupation with religious thought actually goes right back to his teenage years in Paris, and the subsequent friendship with some of the important religious writers of the day. The contradictions between Liszt’s perceived lifestyle and his devout intentions were a regular subject for speculation and even ridicule, but any proper investigation of Liszt’s life and letters reveals a deeply thoughtful and complex man, whose religious sensibilities must be taken absolutely seriously. His efforts to produce a new and viable language for church music, incorporating the language of the music drama, earned him as many enemies as friends, but the actual range of style of his religious music encompasses everything from the dramatic gesture to a return to an austere simplicity echoing a much earlier age. The piano works of a religious character show the same variety, and a good few of them are transcriptions of his own choral pieces. Much of this music has been completely neglected, even to the point of not being published until a century after the composer’s death, and in this respect the choral versions have suffered worse than the piano pieces. Recent revivals of some of the large-scale choral works may hint at a change in favour, and perhaps some of the rarer pieces in this collection will eventually join the repertoire alongside the two undisputed masterpieces: Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude and Funérailles.
Liszt made several settings of all or part of the Ave Maria, and all six piano works of this title are included here. Fortunately, they are each in a different key, which helps with identification! The E major piece is not connected with a vocal work, and, although the rhythm fits the opening of the text the ecclestiastical connection remains general. The subtitle ‘The Bells of Rome’ may not be Liszt’s, but the bell effects are specifically indicated. The piece was composed for the piano method of Lebert and Stark. The Ave Maria (d’Arcadelt) was issued with the Alleluia, although the key is really the only thing the pieces share. The Alleluia is based on material from the choral work Cantico del sol di San Francesco d’Assisi, whilst the Ave Maria is Jacques Arcadelt (c1505–1568) twice removed. Louis Dietsch (1808–1865) produced the piece in 1842 as an Arcadelt discovery, but was subsequently shown to have adapted the text of the Ave Maria to Arcadelt’s three-voice chanson ‘Nous voyons que les hommes’. Liszt added the rocking accompaniment in his transcriptions for piano and for organ. The D major Ave Maria was one of nine motets issued in 1871. This transcription (also the one for organ) is very straightforward, but the D flat version is extended with a florid variation. The tiny G major piece is adapted from a late vocal work, and the B flat version in the Harmonies poétiques is adapted from Liszt’s first choral setting of the text.

The Ave maris stella exists in three vocal and two instrumental versions, and the text is laid out above the latter. The piano version is quite elaborately coloured compared to the choral original, but the mood remains restrained.
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FRANZ LISZT : Weihnachtsbaum & Via Crucis (Leslie Howard) (1998) FLAC (image+.cue), lossless

Although all of the pieces recorded here come from Liszt’s later period, and whilst most of them use the piano in a very restrained way, there could scarcely be a greater contrast in atmosphere between the Christmas Tree suite and the sombre Stations of the Cross. Of course there is the obvious contrast between the birth and the death of Jesus, but Liszt moves to the extremes of musical expression between almost secular lighthearted gaiety in some of the Christmas pieces to a relentless sense of horror and distress in the Passiontide pieces.
The Christmas Tree suite occupied Liszt for quite some time—he was determined to make an especially good job of it to present to his granddaughter Daniela (daughter of Hans von Bülow and Cosima) to whom the set is dedicated—and he also made a charming arrangement of it for piano duet. The bulk of the work was carried out between 1874 and 1876, although Liszt kept touching the pieces up until the time of publication. The first four numbers are marked ‘piano ossia armonium’, and are nowadays additionally included with Liszt’s organ music. The whole work is arranged in three groups of four pieces which, broadly, present traditional carol melodies, a child’s view of Christmas, and a maturer person’s recollections.
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FRANZ LISZT : Sonata, Elegies & Consolations (Leslie Howard) (1998) FLAC (image+.cue), lossless

Writers on Liszt are unanimous in their verdict upon the Sonata in B minor: it is Liszt’s greatest piano work, if not indeed his finest composition. It is also one of the few important Liszt works to be ostensibly free of any kind of programme or external reference, although, as Alfred Brendel and others have contended, a case can be made out for relating the structure and content of the piece to Goethe’s Faust. (If, as seems more likely, the piece is autobiographical or self-revelatory, the connection with Faust may still be drawn.) And Brendel is surely right to reject the notion, based on the use of the so-called ‘Cross-motif’ – three notes rising by a tone and a minor third, the first three notes of the plainsong Vexilla regis prodeunt – in the Grandioso second subject, that there is a religious dimension to the work. For a general analysis of the piece of not too technical a nature, Brendel’s essay in Music Sounded Out is strongly commended. Here, a few brief observations must suffice.
Without entering into the many different interpretations by critical commentators upon the broad structure of the work, we may content ourselves that the piece is in a single, unbroken movement, containing a slow central section and a scherzo-like fugato which, viewing the work as a large first-movement form, more or less play the part of the Classical development section as well as give the impression of several movements in one. Liszt was, of course, influenced by Schubert’s ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy in the shape of the piece, but strove to create more of a single dramatic design. He had, by this time, already written two large-scale piano works in which he attempted to fuse elements of two movements into one: the Grosses Konzertsolo and the Scherzo and March, but, excellent as those attempts are, it is only in the Sonata where the aim is triumphantly achieved. Liszt worked very long and carefully at this project, and we may be thankful that he never risked invidious comparison by ever composing a second piano work of these dimensions. The Sonata remains the most important and original contribution to the form since Beethoven and Schubert.
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FRANZ LISZT : Hexaméron & Symphonie fantastique (Leslie Howard) (1998) FLAC (image+.cue), lossless

Collaboration between composers has never been particularly fashionable, and usually only succeeds when each composer is separately commissioned to write a movement or a variation. Even then, the most famous examples are notoriously uneven: the ‘other’ Diabelli variations, despite contributions from Schubert and the eleven-year-old Liszt, remain a pretty unexciting collection, and who is interested nowadays in the Minkus bits of La Source beside the glorious pages of Delibes? Schumann himself ditched the movements of the ‘FAE’ Sonata by Dietrich and Brahms in order to make a whole sonata of his own, and Rimsky-Korsakov rewrote a complete opera-ballet, Mlada, to expunge the foreign parts—with Mussorgsky among the casualties. But the Hexaméron is really a success, even if its technical demands keep its concert appearances relatively rare.
The Princess Belgiojoso’s concert, actually for the benefit of Italian refugees, took place in Paris on 31 March 1837, but the Hexaméron was not completed in time. The concert has passed into history, nonetheless, for being the occasion of the celebrated pianistic ‘duel’ between Liszt and Thalberg, yielding the Princess’s legendary verdict that ‘Thalberg is the first pianist in the world—Liszt is the only one’. What certainly never took place was a combined performance of the piece by all six composers, despite many later commentaries. Nor did six pianists ever line up in front of an orchestra to perform it until some recent occasions. In any case, the only score in Liszt’s hand of an orchestral version is shortened by half. Curiously, the original solo version has many indications of a proposed orchestral accompaniment which is clearly intended for the entire piece, and a tutti passage is specified in the finale. But since no orchestral version of this passage in Liszt’s, or any other contemporary’s, hand has yet shown up, the passage is recorded here in Liszt’s printed version for solo piano for completeness’ sake. (Liszt also made two quite different two-piano scores of the piece, neither of which is as long as the original, and one of which has an entirely rewritten ending.)

The title and form of this surprisingly well-integrated work are Liszt’s: he collected and ordered the other composers’ contributions, even removing the the last bar of both the Czerny and the Chopin variations to make a better link into two interludes of his own—the first a dramatic interruption, the second a reflective coda before the finale. The noble introduction begins with a theme by Liszt which he often combines and contrasts with Bellini’s theme. Liszt’s variation is restrained and not at all virtuosic, and Chopin stays aloof from the bravura in a beautiful nocturne. Thalberg, with his three-handed effects, Pixis, with his wicked octaves, Herz with his moto perpetuo, and especially Czerny, with a battery of devilish tricks no doubt intended to test even his most famous student, do their utmost to astound. Liszt saves his thunder until the finale, where he cocks a gentle snook at each of his collaborators before a brilliant peroration.
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FRANZ LISZT : The Late Pieces (Leslie Howard) (1998) APE (image+.cue), lossless

Liszt's third period' may be said to begin with his departure from Weimar, and especially with his retirement to Rome in the middle 1860s. From this point to the end of his life his music contains a great deal of introspection and almost a disregard of the likely fate of many of the works, only a few of which were performed and published in his lifetime. Orchestral works are rare, and the choral works after the completion of Christus tend to be on a small scale without orchestral accompaniment. The songs and piano pieces become starker, and the textures become leaner, even in the few ‘public’ pieces like the later Mephisto Waltzes and Rhapsodies. Leaving aside the late dances, the religious pieces and the great collections (the third Année de pèlerinage, the Christmas Tree suite and the Historical Hungarian Portraits), the present recording brings together all of the late character pieces for piano, as well as the piano versions of late works which also exist in other forms.
This is an altogether astounding body of work from an indefatigable imagination, in its way comparable to the late Beethoven Quartets or Bach’s Musical Offering and The Art of Fugue. The psychiatrist Anthony Storr, in his book The School of Genius, writes: ‘The old often show less interest in interpersonal relationships, are more content to be alone, and become more preoccupied with their own, internal concerns … this change … can be most clearly seen in the productions of those who have left behind a series of works of abiding interest.’ Storr rightly defines the first period of an artist’s life as a training time, the second as the advent of mastery and individuality, often combined with a need for a wide public, and the third as ‘a time when communication with others tends to be replaced by works depending more upon solitary meditation’.
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FRANZ LISZT : Années de pèlerinage III (Leslie Howard) (1998) FLAC (image+.cue), lossless

Liszt's late piano works are of a character not met elsewhere in the great music literature of the nineteenth century. The thinning out of the style, almost to the point of deliberate barrenness, and the simultaneous impression of avant-garde pioneering and the solitary reflection that comes with age is unique to Liszt. The uncompromising nature of much of this music led to its instant neglect, and, in many cases, its lack of publication until well into the twentieth century.
Other volumes in this series explore the late waltzes, three of the larger sets of pieces (Via Crucis, Christmas Tree and the Chorales) and the single character pieces of the last period of Liszt’s life, and still to come are some of the late transcriptions, the last Rhapsodies and the other late dances and marches. The present programme comprises the remaining sets of pieces (not cycles, however many times they may have been so described) and two other rarities from the 1880s.

Much criticism was raised against Liszt because, in many of his earlier works of an overtly Hungarian nature, he had not differentiated between gypsy café music or professionally composed music and Hungarian folksong. (It always strikes me as a colossal injustice that other composers of the time—such as Brahms in his Hungarian Dances—were never castigated in the slightest for afflicting serious butchery on folk material, and yet Liszt, who certainly treated his source material with love and wit, whatever its origins might have been, stood condemned.) Almost as a conscious act of atonement, it seems, Liszt arranged five ‘real’ Hungarian folksongs, even indicating repeats to correspond with the number of verses in the original poem, just as he did in his chorale arrangements, and, as there, these repeats are not germane to the musical structure and are not generally performed. He even included the texts, in the Hungarian which he could not himself read with any fluency, at the head of each of these charming miniatures. More notes of Leslie Howard

FRANZ LISZT : À la Chapelle Sixtine (Leslie Howard) (1998) FLAC (image+.cue), lossless

A la Chapelle Sixtine is a very unusual work, inspired by Liszt’s hearing two very different motets in the Sistine Chapel: the famous Miserere mei Deus by Gregorio Allegri (1582–1652), and Mozart’s last work of this kind—the Ave verum corpus, K618, of 1791. The story of Allegri’s work is well-known: composed for the papal choir at the time of Urban VIII, the work was not permitted to be published, and it circulated for centuries in a handful of written copies. The fourteen-year-old Mozart copied the piece from memory. Although the original piece is famous for its antiphonal chorus with high Cs, Liszt concentrates on the marvellous harmonies of its beginning, and uses them to generate a passacaglia in G minor whose variations come to a stormy climax before the Mozart piece is revealed in the simplest transcription in B major. By way of one of Liszt’s finest modulatory passages, the variations return, much shortened, before the Mozart reappears, this time in F sharp—incidentally, it is this passage which Tchaikovsky used as the basis for the slow movement of his fourth orchestral Suite, opus 61, ‘Mozartiana’. Liszt extends Mozart’s music to allow a gentle modulation to G major, and the piece finishes with distant hints of the Allegri in the bass. Liszt made an orchestral version of the piece which has, at the time of writing, never been published or performed, a version for piano duet, and a rather more frequently performed version for organ—with the title improved by the adding of the initial word ‘Évocation’.
The passing of the age of deriding the transcription allows us to be joyful at one composer’s enthusiasm and understanding of the works of another. Transcription, in any case, has been a valid way of music making in almost every generation of the history of Western music, and it cannot be simply assumed that the gramophone has replaced it as a likely means of disseminating music not often encountered in live performance. In the case of his very careful arrangements of seven of Bach’s greatest organ works, it should be mentioned that Liszt was at the forefront of the revival of serious study of polyphonic organ playing and the independent study of the pedalboard in order to restore the neglected Bach to his public. Liszt also published an edition of Bach’s organ music in which he also added two other pieces of Bach in his own transcription for the organ. The Sechs Präludien und Fugen für die Orgel-pedal und -manual von Johann Sebastian Bach—Für das Pianoforte zu zwei Händen gesetzt von Franz Liszt were the first in a long series of Bach transcriptions by many of the great pianists and pianist-composers which extended from the mid-nineteenth century to our own times through such names as Brahms, Tausig, Saint-Saëns, d’Albert, Busoni, Reger, Grainger, Rachmaninov and Bartók. Apart from the obvious purpose of communicating Bach’s music through the instrument with which these composers felt most comfortable, there is also a sense of greater satisfaction at being able to exploit the piano for its innate good qualities in a way that simply playing Bach’s harpsichord and clavichord works on the piano seldom produces. Doubling bass notes in octaves, for example, is present in virtually every piano piece in the literature, and the use of the sustaining pedal not just as a colouring device, but also to hold notes which the fingers cannot keep depressed, and the consequent inevitable blurring of some counterpoint, is equally ubiquitous. Now, the organ works of Bach, especially, are familiar to us from acoustical surroundings in which, willy-nilly, something like the effect of a sustaining pedal is achieved, and the power of the pedal organ is usually such as to make the lowest voice of the texture disproportionately strong. In his transcriptions, Liszt carefully doubles the pedal part in octaves wherever practical and appropriate, but otherwise alters Bach’s text almost never, aside from some necessary octave transpositions to allow the hands to reach all the voices, and the fleshing out of a few rhetorical chords. He adds no tempo directions, dynamics or phrasing marks of any sort. As to Bach’s originals, the question of dating their origin is still unsettled, although most of them date from his time in Weimar. Some were revised later in Cöthen, and at least two of them (E minor and B minor) probably date from his time in Leipzig. It doesn’t really matter; all these works are the mature Bach at his best extended style, and the variety of idea and structure remains astounding to us all. In the playing of the transcriptions it seems best to proceed as Liszt probably did, and to study them on the organ in order not to be tempted into spurious pianistic effects—although the problem of memorising them in versions with and without pedalboard becomes acute. It is worth trying to reproduce the effects of eighteenth-century registration, articulation and ornamentation wherever feasible, and, as with all of Liszt’s literal transcriptions, it is important to go to the best available source of the original in order to check the text—Liszt was generally very scrupulous about the matter, so there are only one or two small corrections to make. In the case of J. Seb. Bachs Orgel Fantasie und Fuge in g-moll—Für Pianoforte gesetzt von Franz v. Liszt Liszt approached the work quite differently. He adds a number of dynamic marks, tempo directions, pedal directions and a certain amount of phrasing. This was possibly at the request of its dedicatee, Sigmund Lebert, the famous piano pedagogue, who may have feared that the average piano student would not know how to cope with a score unadorned by such indications. The piece was certainly published in the Lebert and Stark Piano School. In the revised edition (recorded here), at four places in the Fantasia Liszt suggests an alternative extra voice in place of rests, in no way intending to improve upon Bach, but attempting to recreate the grandeur of this most powerful work by reinforcing the texture. Leslie Howard

FRANZ LISZT : Christus & St Elisabeth (Leslie Howard) (1998) FLAC (image+.cue), lossless

The recent revival of interest in Liszt’s oratorios has been a welcome change from the well-nigh total neglect into which they had fallen. True, oratorio by and large is not the great staple of the repertoire it once was, and, with the exception of one or two favourites, very few works of this genre enjoy any real popularity today. It is probably a question of expense which keeps one-time regulars like Mendelssohn’s St Paul, Dvorák’s St Ludmilla or Gounod’s Mors et Vita out of concert programmes, and in contrast with, say, the mighty library of oratorio vocal scores which Novello published a century ago, even the greatest works are rarities, and the recording industry has scarcely been able to fill the gaps.
Liszt’s Masses and oratorios were very important to him and were all composed with particular care and subject to intense self-criticism and reworking. The early success of the great orchestral Mass for the Consecration of the Basilika at Esztergom (‘Graner-Messe’) may have encouraged Liszt to complete Die Legende von der heiligen Elisabeth, his first oratorio. The time to complete the work was at hand too, since Liszt had resigned his post at Weimar. Although Liszt refused to attend a production in 1883, the work was quite often given as an opera in the nineteenth century—it is certainly as close as Liszt ever came to completing an opera in his maturity: the work is organized rather like a set-number opera with solos, choruses and orchestral pieces, but bound together by a series of themes and their transformations. These themes, which Liszt quotes in the preface to the full score, act as leitmotifs in the drama

The first, which dominates the orchestral introduction and recurs in some form whenever Saint Elizabeth herself is involved, is a plainchant, ‘Quasi stella matutina’, copied for Liszt by Mihály Mosonyi from an old Hungarian ecclesiastical hymnal. The second, ‘On the Life of St Elizabeth’, which is heard at the beginning of the ‘Interludium’, is from the seventeenth-century collection Lyra coelestis of György Naray. The third, which is a Hungarian popular song given to Liszt by the violinist Reményi, appears in the central martial section of the ‘Interludium’. The Saxon hymn ‘Schönster Herr Jesu’ is used as the lyrical melody in the ‘Crusaders’ March’, while the fifth, a plainchant-derived group of three ascending notes (G, A, C) forms the basis of the main theme of that march, and is, in fact, the so-called ‘Cross-motif’ which recurs throughout Liszt’s religious music, from the Esztergom Mass to the Via Crucis. The vocal score (which also used to be printed by Novello with a Liszt-approved English text) was prepared by Liszt himself.
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FRANZ LISZT : Song Transcriptions (Leslie Howard) 2CD (1998) APE (image+.cue), lossless

These 'songs without words', as they might be called, represent a great proportion of the many such transcriptions that Liszt made. Neglecting earlier versions and simplified versions they represent all of Liszt’s works in this genre relating to these seven composers, and are complemented by the numerous transcriptions of Schubert songs, of six Chopin songs, of many of Liszt’s own songs, and of a small number of single songs by various composers from Alyabiev to Wielhorsky, bringing the total to well over 150. Just as with Liszt’s operatic transcriptions, there is quite a range of style and approach, from the literal transcription to the fantasy, but the primary aim seems to have been to make the music available to a wider public—the lieder recital as we know it simply didn’t exist in Liszt’s day. Both for the sake of proselytizing for the songs and for giving a better idea to the pianist about the kind of interpretation required, Liszt almost invariably lays the original song text in the piano score, and is always clear about which musical line belonged originally to the voice.
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FRANZ LISZT : Bunte Reihe (Leslie Howard) (1998) APE (image+.cue), lossless

 Reviews
‘Brilliant, and apart from its value as Liszt documentation the issue is an entertaining curiosity’ (Classic CD)
«Beaucoup de raffinement, une technique très sûre. et surtout un sens de la dramatisation de la mise en space» (Répertoire, France)

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

In the notes to the first volume of Liszt at the Opera it was observed that the species to which Liszt contributed so fulsomely has not always been regarded with great favour, although, considering the art which Liszt brings to all of his operatic piano works, the criticisms in his case seem churlish. And, as so often with Liszt, the whole category of works used to be condemned on the basis of a scant acquaintance with one or two of the pieces. Things appear to be improving somewhat, and the present writer can at least claim to have given an all—‘Liszt at the Opera’ recital programme in many different countries without risk to health or reputation. The works in this second gathering, like the first, show many different ways of treating the original materials and range over a good many years of Liszt’s creative life.
The pieces based on Meyerbeer’s Le Prophète represent Liszt’s largest work in this genre. Even without the ‘Ad nos’, the Illustrations are enormous, and manage to include many aspects of the opera. Le Prophète was a tremendous success in its day and, although there have been recent revivals, it is really necessary to try and think of the work as it must have seemed to Meyerbeer’s contemporaries to imagine (understand?) why Liszt should have taken quite such an interest in it. But no apologies are required for the attractive and sensible skills of Meyerbeer’s composition, and many music lovers will recall the successo strepitoso of Constant Lambert’s ballet Les Patineurs culled from the same source. And the Coronation March, in various arrangements, was a regular drawing-room and organ loft companion for half a century or more.

The first Illustration is of the medley paraphrase variety. It may, of course, be performed independently of its fellows, but the pieces work very well as a contrasted set, and there is a certain amount of thematic cross-referencing.

Although Liszt’s subtitle accounts for the main material of the piece, the movement is seriously infiltrated by the Coronation March which appears, ghostlike, at the outset, and whose trio section dominates the peroration. The Prière is rather fragmented but introduces the theme ‘Ad nos’ in Meyerbeer’s original compound time (cf. the ‘Ad nos’ Fantasy and Fugue). Quite the most impressive passage is the fanfare which leads from the Hymne to the Marche du sacre, which is itself defiantly four-square.
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FRANZ LISZT : Liszt at the Theatre (Leslie Howard) (1998) APE (image+.cue), lossless

Whilst Liszt’s piano music derived from music for plays is a much smaller body of work than his catalogue of operatic pieces, the approach in his methods of composition, elaboration and transcription remains broadly the same. As far as present Liszt scholarship permits one ever to be categorical, this recording contains all of Liszt’s works in this genre.
The quite extensive scores for the theatre commonly written in the nineteenth century eventually overpowered both the plays they accompanied and the time limit for an audience’s concentration. Today few would relish an uncut performance of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt given with the entire Grieg score if they knew beforehand that the evening would take at least one hour longer than Götterdämmerung, and it has been only rarely that Mendelssohn’s Shakespearean efforts have been produced in tandem with the complete play. But much incidental music—which can take the form of overture, dances, songs, intermezzos or entr’actes, choruses or melodramas, as well as shorter flourishes and fanfares, entrance and exit fragments—has always had an independent life in the concert hall, and for Liszt, to whom the propagation of all kinds of music was a sacred duty, selected several works for re-working as recital pieces.

For some reason the piano transcription of the ever-popular Turkish March from The Ruins of Athens disappeared from view, to be replaced in pianists’ affections by the well-known transcription by Anton Rubinstein. Liszt’s version—every bit as interesting—is one of his rarest works. The identical pages stand at the head of the score of Capriccio alla turca, a much more extensive piece in Liszt’s virtuoso manner, in which the March (No 4 in Beethoven’s score) is succeeded by the Dervishes’ Chorus (No 3 in Beethoven’s score; also, at one time, known in a piano transcription by Saint-Saëns) in a section marked Andante fantastico, full of diabolical trills. Eventually the March returns, much transformed, and both themes are used to produce a triumphant coda. Possibly because of its difficulty, the Capriccio gave way to Liszt’s last work on the same material, the Fantasie, which started life as a work for piano and orchestra but which was substantially revised and reissued together with versions for solo piano, piano duet, and two pianos. The Fantasie begins with a transcription of the orchestral part of the March and Chorus (which form Beethoven’s No 6, and which Beethoven reissued as opus 124 with minor changes for the music to Die Weihe des Hauses—‘The Consecration of the House’) which breaks out with a cadenza in octaves into a much more fantastic working of the material, which then subsides into the Dervishes’ Chorus. From this point, there are many resemblances to the Capriccio but the atmosphere is rather more controlled and the fireworks held in abeyance until the coda. There, closing passages of the March and Chorus lead into a final peroration upon the other two themes.
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FRANZ LISZT : Liebesträume and other song transcriptions (Leslie Howard) (1998) APE (image+.cue), lossless

It is probably only just that the best known work of the greatest transcriber in the history of Western music should be a transcription, but fortunate, at least, that it should be a transcription of one of his own works. The third of the Liebesträume, often quite erroneously entitled ‘Liebestraum No 3’ (the plural applies to each piece), is one of the world’s most treasured melodies, and it has been the piano transcription, rather than the equally splendid original song, that has claimed a permanent place on the short-list of best love-inspired themes. But all three pieces are characterised by generous melodic lines, and they work very well as a group—as do the original songs. Each piece bears the title ‘Notturno’, and the subtitle—the song title, in fact—and the full text of the song follow. As a triptych, the Liebesträume invite comparison with the three settings of Petrarch sonnets, which also became better known as piano pieces. (In this series of recordings those transcriptions will appear in due course in both versions.) For the German songs, however, Liszt used two different poets: Ludwig Uhland’s Hohe Liebe speaks of the heaven on earth that has come from being drunk in the arms of love, and his Seliger Tod (the piece has often been known by the poem’s first line: ‘Gestorben war ich’) makes the conceit of love being a happy death awakened by a kiss, while Ferdinand Freiligrath’s O Lieb! enjoins us to love whilst we may, for love lost is miserable. (There is an earlier piano piece based on the second of these songs which will appear later in this series, and a later echo of it in the second of the Meyendorff Klavierstücke, which has already been recorded on volume 11: Late Pieces.)
The two Liszt Songbooks contain twelve of his early songs in very straightforward transcriptions, in the sense that the music basically follows the original song bar-for-bar, with a certain amount of cadential licence but without the addition of extended variation. Liszt makes every effort to preserve all of the character, if not the actual text, of the original accompaniment, and he adds the vocal line to the texture, often distributed between the two hands and sometimes doubled at the octave. All of these transcriptions are rarities, largely due to Liszt’s acute self-criticism in the matter of his songs. All six of the transcriptions in the first book follow upon an issue in one volume of the six original songs. But Liszt withdrew the songs and revised them, and allowed the transcriptions to fade away because they no longer represented his attitude to the poems. Eventually he made a transcription of the revised setting of Heine’s Die Lorelei which was for a time rather popular, but the others remained in only the one-piano version. The second book suffered a worse fate: all six transcriptions remained in manuscript. Four of the songs later underwent revision. The transcriptions were believed lost for many years, although they were tantalisingly mentioned in a few catalogues, and it was not until the excellent Neue Liszt-Ausgabe volume I/18 of 1985 that they were finally published.

The poetry which inspired all these works is generally familiar. Heine’s Die Lorelei tells the familiar story of the siren-like witch who haunts a rock in the river Rhine—Liszt’s dramatic setting (in either version) is vastly superior to the tawdry little Silcher version beloved of amateur children’s choruses, but the revised version is more subtle, less four-square, and there may even be a deliberate hint of the Tristan prelude in the introduction; Am Rhein im schönen Strome (‘In the beautiful waters of the Rhine’) is also by Heine and best known in Schumann’s setting in Dichterliebe—but Schumann changes ‘schönen’ to ‘heiligen’ and, having thus canonised the river, makes his song an allegory, whereas Liszt remains faithful to the beauty of the waters which he reflects in a florid accompaniment of either 9 or 12 notes to the bar (he used the 12-note version in the transcription); Mignons Lied from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister—Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn (‘Do you know the land where the lemons bloom’)—has been set by many a composer (Liszt made a transcription of Beethoven’s setting, for example, recorded on volume 15 of the present series) and Liszt’s setting has proved one of his more durable songs. The music reflects the growing intensity of each verse of the poem, and the faster refrain: ‘Dahin!’ (‘Return!’) eventually requires the most impassioned expression. Goethe’s ballad of the king of Thule and his golden goblet—the gift of his dying lady love which brought tears to his eyes whenever he drank from it, and which he threw into the sea as he was dying rather than allow it to be inherited—is one of Liszt’s finest dramatic songs, and the transcription contains no superfluous decoration. Der du von dem Himmel bist (‘You who are from Heaven’) is again from Goethe and much beloved of composers. Subtitled ‘Invocation’, the piece is held together by a felicitous motif of pair of rising and falling semiquavers. The last of the collection, actually the first-composed of all the Liszt songs, was originally set in Italian —Bocella’s poem Angiolin dal biondo crin (‘Little angel with the golden locks’)—and later issued in German as ‘Englein du mit blondem Haar’. Both titles and the poems in both languages appear at the head of the piano transcription. The piece is a very simple love song in six verses, which becomes almost like a set of variations in the transcription.

All of the songs chosen for the second songbook are settings of Victor Hugo, and the first four, at least, have always been amongst Liszt’s most performed songs. His setting of the French language came easier to him at first than German setting, and his melodic style was often more expansive as a result. In Oh! quand je dors (‘Oh! when I sleep’) the poet asks for his lover to appear to him as Laura did to Petrarch. Comment, disaient-ils (‘How? say the lads’) is one of Liszt’s few songs at an animated tempo and suits to perfection Hugo’s little dialogue of questions and answers from the lads to the lasses. Enfant, si j’étais roi (‘Child, if I were king’)—a marvellous poem of love, telling first of what the poet would do for the child if he were king, and if he were God—set by Liszt with real majesty. S’il est un charmant gazon (‘If it is a charming green’) is a graceful setting of another love poem whose conceits are that the poet would like to be the path beneath the lover’s foot, or a nest for the lover’s heart (the text of the Liszt transcription presents a few minor problems towards the end: this performance transposes the right hand down by an octave in bars 48-56). La tombe et la rose is an allegorical conversation between a grave and a rose, each pressing its merits upon the other, the grave’s final observation being that out of every soul it receives it makes an angel. Liszt’s intense tremolos and dotted rhythms make it a powerful piece indeed. Gastibelza is the song of an eponymous carabiniero in the form of a bolero-cum-love-song of the man with the rifle who is made mad by ‘le vent qui vient à travers le montagne’ (‘the wind that comes over the mountain’). Here Liszt wisely shortened the number of verses of the original song in order to make a tighter construction for the piano piece and a fitting conclusion to the collection as a whole. Leslie Howard