Awesome Music / Franz Liszt

Franz Liszt is widely regarded as one of the greatest piano virtuosi of all time, even to this day. As he also composed extensively (and arranged many other composers' works for piano) with an eye to showcasing his skill at the piano, awesomeness in his compositions is a natural result. The only tragedy is that Liszt himself retired from performing before the advent of recorded music, so we have only contemporary accounts to tell us how these colossi of the piano's repertoire sounded in the hands of the man who wrote them to perform himself.

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• The cornerstone of Liszt's output is the set of nineteen Hungarian Rhapsodies, in which he gave free rein to his lifelong fascination with Hungarian folk music.^note  Or so he believed; many of the melodies he incorporated were actually composed by upper middle class Hungarians, such as József Kossovits, and had simply become popular with folk bands of the early 1800s. By far the most famous is No.2 in C-sharp minor/F-sharp major, the lively Friska section that forms the second half being a Standard Snippet popular with American animation studios (particularly for cartoons of recitals going awry, such as The Cat Concerto from MGM, Rhapsody Rabbit from Warner Bros., and Who Framed Roger Rabbit). Other highlights include No.6 in D-flat major/B-flat major with its synthesis of four disparate ideas (which were originally written as four separate pieces in the set of twenty-two Magyar dalok and Magyar rapszódiák^note  Respectively, "Hungarian national melodies" and "Hungarian rhapsodies", which include early versions of Hungarian Rhapsodies Nos.3-15) and its thundering quadruple octave coda, No.9 in E-flat major ("Carnival in Pest"), in which Liszt's flair for theme-and-variation development is in full flow, and No.11 in A minor/F-sharp major, in which Liszt, by cannily moving between relative and parallel minors and majors, ends up on entirely the opposite side of the circle of fifths from where he began.
• Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No.15 in A minor, the "Rakoczy March", is a technically demanding piece even by Liszt's usual standards. In the hands of Russian virtuoso Vladimir Horowitz, however, it becomes almost an entirely new piece... and reaches entirely new levels of awesome in the process.
• Liebestraum No.3 in A-flat major is one of Liszt's most emotionally powerful works for piano, and another Standard Snippet.
• The Transcendental Études are twelve packets of concentrated awesome in musical form.
  • The vivacious No.1 in C major ("Preludio"), though only 50-60 seconds long, grabs the listener by the collar as if to say "Incoming awesome! Get ready!" as it gallops up and down the register to a joyous final measure.
  • The jagged No.2 in A minor^note  subtitled "Fusées" by Ferruccio Busoni stumbles and tumbles its way through twists and turns, and though barely two minutes long, it is a severe test of any pianist's endurance.
  • The dramatic No.4 in D minor ("Mazeppa") is a musical rendition of the story of Ivan Mazepa,^note  Liszt's interpretation was specifically inspired by Victor Hugo's poem "Mazeppa". The final lines of Hugo's poem - "Il tombe, et se relève roi!" ("He falls, and rises again a king!") - appear over the coda of the étude. a Ukrainian nobleman who survived an attempted "execution" by being stripped naked and tied to a charging horse to conquer his torturers on the battlefield, and, after a series of flourishes in the introduction, goes through multiple percussive parallel third renditions of the horse's galloping, getting faster and faster, until the horse drops dead and Mazeppa rises triumphant for a major key coda.
  • The sparkling No.5 in B-flat major ("Feux-follets") is one of the most difficult of the set, the musical depiction of the capricious movements of the will-o'-the-wisp rendered with parallel voices in ever changing intervals that must be delivered with featherlight touch.
  • The grandiose No.6 in G minor ("Vision") moves from minor key solemnity in its opening measures to unbridled major key energy about halfway through, and somehow Liszt finds a way to keep topping himself with each canter up and down the piano.
  • The martial No.7 in E-flat major ("Eroica") follows in the footsteps of Beethoven, Liszt's teacher's teacher, in making the key of E-flat one of heroism, the energy building to a gargantuan quadruple octave rendition of the main melodic idea.
  • The literal wild ride of No.8 in C minor ("Wilde jagd") is a hectic journey of uneven rhythms and block chords, and it's a wonder the pianist doesn't drop lifeless to the floor when the wild hunt's quarry does the same (in a surprising blaze of major key glory) at the end.
  • The tumultuous No.10 in F minor^note  nicknamed "Appassionata" by Busoni starts with fast interlocking chords in both hands and just gets more awesome - and difficult - from there.
  • The set closes with the restless No.12 in B-flat minor ("Chasse-neige"), a musical snowstorm simultaneously requiring hands of iron and feather, over which a melancholy melody rises.
  • And this was the third version of the etudes published by Liszt; the first and least ambitious, "Études en douze exercices", was his first published composition as a teenager, while the second, Douze grandes études, is even more difficult than the final version. They are rarely played or recorded, but must be heard to be believed.
• Niccolo Paganini is widely regarded as one of the greatest violin virtuosi of all time. It's only natural that Liszt, one of the greatest piano virtuosi of all time, should turn his attention to adapting some of Paganini's music for piano, with awesome results. Liszt adapted five of Paganini's 24 Caprices for solo violin^note  Specifically, in the order in which they appear in Liszt's set, No.6 in G minor (bookended by the introduction and coda to No.5 in A minor, transposed down to G minor), No.17 in E-flat major, No.1 in E major, No.9 in E major, and No.24 in A minor. and the finale of one of his violin concerti for piano as the Grandes Études de Paganini; most famous is No.3 in G-sharp minor, "La Campanella", adapted from the finale to Paganini's Violin Concerto No.2 in B minor and achieving the effect of the high-pitched bell (the "campanella" of the title) in the original with acrobatic right-hand leaps to the very top of the piano's register, but No.6 in A minor is also well worth a listen, showing that the theme and variations from the original lend themselves just as well to virtuosity on the piano as they do on the violin.^note  This same caprice has furnished the theme for sets of variations from numerous other composers, such as Brahms (twice!) and Rachmaninoff, but Liszt's variations are adaptations of those by Paganini rather than purely original.
• Liszt's contributions to the étude are rounded out by two sets of concert études and a "grand development étude", every one packed with awesome. The earlier set of concert études comprises "Il Lamento", characterised by its ambitious scale and ever changing key; "La Leggierezza", a fluid piece full of long chromatic runs and double third runs; and the most famous of the set, "Un sospiro", an acrobatic work requiring frequent crossing of hands. The later set includes the shimmering "Walderauschen" and the skipping, tripping "Gnomenreigen", both of which seem to require at least eight fingers per hand to play properly. And the "Grande étude de perfectionnement", "Ab irato", goes from a brutal, parallel octave and crossed hand dominated minor key section to a major key coda involving long, light runs up and down the piano's register, all in just over two minutes.
• The Grand Galop Chromatique is one of the most lively and humorous works to centre around chromatic scales ever composed, and is a real delight to both see and hear performed. It becomes especially awesome for both senses in the hands of Hungarian virtuoso Gyorgy Cziffra.
• The first Mephisto Waltz shocked contemporary audiences when it was first performed... which is really what a musical depiction of Mephistopheles ought to do. The savagery of the piece is still a treat for both performers and listeners to this day.
• Funérailles, by far the most famous piece from Liszt's three sets of "Harmonies poétiques et religieuses", is a deeply personal work composed by Liszt as an elegy for the squashing of the 1848 revolution in Hungary by the Austrian Habsburgs and as a farewell to his friend Frédéric Chopin, who passed away in 1849. Where the third Liebestraum is one of his most beautiful compositions, "Funérailles" is one of his most heart-rending.
• Liszt's Sonata in B minor, dedicated to Robert Schumann,^note  Though Schumann never heard the work performed, as by the time it was finished, he had had a psychological breakdown and, after attempting suicide by drowning, spent the last years of his life voluntarily committed to an asylum. stands as one of the greatest piano sonatas since Beethoven, and is all the more remarkable when one notes how almost the entire 30-minute work, in one movement but with outlines of a traditional four-movement structure built into it, is spun from material stated in the opening 30 seconds, yet it never seems to run out of ideas.
• To say Liszt was only a composer for solo piano is to do him a disservice; he was also quite at home writing for piano and orchestra.
  • His Piano Concerto No.1 in E-flat major is a single movement in four subsections, packed end to end with the flashy virtuosity for which Liszt is famous, but also finds time for some truly charming melodies, one of the loveliest of which first appears in the "slow movement", but is later transformed into a triumphant, swaggering march at the beginning of the "finale". The build-up to the coda seems to keep turning up the intensity higher and higher until finally the piano and orchestra go out in a crackling fireworks display.
  • Although Liszt's Piano Concerto No.2 in A major is less virtuosic than its predecessor, with the piano playing a supporting role for much of the piece and not even getting the main theme in its entirety after the introduction, it makes up for it with a more mature structure, built in six subsections and pushing the idea of using and re-using the same melodic idea in very different contexts - a hallmark of Liszt's style - to its very limit. And like the first concerto, the build-up to the exuberant coda is pure exhilaration.
  • The violent Totentanz is one of Liszt's most forward-looking compositions, with the piano almost playing the role of a percussion instrument rather than a melodic instrument, particularly in the opening measures. The theme for the variations that make up the work is based on the "Dies irae" plainchant, and every variation seems to have something new to say on the subject of death. Where the two piano concerti build up to triumphant final pages, Totentanz retains an air of shocking grimness to the bitter end.
• And Liszt didn't need a piano to compose awesome music.
  • Perhaps his most celebrated orchestral works are the thirteen "symphonic poems" (a musical form he invented to tell the sort of musical tale that could not fit into a standard concert overture). The most famous is "Les préludes", (recognizable from Tom and Jerry cartoons, the Flash Gordon serials, and Nazi propaganda films), but his homages to Greek mythology, "Orpheus" and "Prometheus", and to William Shakespeare, "Hamlet", are also spellbinding in their awesomeness.
  • His two 'symphonies', the Dante Symphony (inspired by Dante's Inferno) and Faust Symphony (inspired by Goethe's Faust), are both in three movements and pave the way for the dramaticism present in post-Romantic and Cinematic music. The very beginning of the Faust symphony is also one of the earliest uses of the 12-tone row, something Schoenberg became famous for.
• Liszt was also a master of arranging other composers' orchestral works for solo piano without losing any of the awesome. His arrangement of Berlioz' Symphonie fantastique helped to popularise the symphony in Berlioz' lifetime, while his arrangements of all nine of Beethoven's symphonies must be heard to be believed.^note  As a teenager, Liszt studied composition under the Austrian composer Carl Czerny, who had himself studied composition under Beethoven and through whom Liszt met Beethoven at least once.

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