Progetto Martha Argerich

italiano

Works

Franz Liszt

Soirées de Vienne, Valses caprices d'après Franz Schubert

 

We cannot know whether Franz Liszt, whose talent as a child prodigy was appreciated in Vienna at the beginning of the 1820s, was ever able to meet Franz Schubert personally. In any case, it is certain that he had a profound and disinterested love for Schubert’s music. Liszt’s admiration for Schubert manifested itself in many ways – first and foremost via the transcriptions and adaptations that the Hungarian pianist and composer made of pieces by Schubert. Liszt transcribed and reworked, for the piano, a great number of vocal and instrumental compositions by his unfortunate colleague, who had died prematurely and in poverty at the age of only thirty-one. Among these, there were no fewer than 58 songs. A recent edition of recordings of Liszt’s complete works for the piano dedicates fully nine CDs – a total of more than eleven hours of music – to the Schubert transcriptions. One of the most important (and oddly, least played) of Liszt’s reworkings of Schubert pieces is the Soirées de Vienne: Valses Caprices d’après Schubert, a series of nine pieces published in 1852, in which 35 waltzes for piano, taken from various collections, are freely adapted and even more freely assembled. Farsighted man that he was, Liszt, had undoubtedly recognised the enormous creative richness behind these short dance pieces, and he wished to “publicise” them, in a manner of speaking. In particular, the Valse Caprice No. 6 was one of Liszt’s favourite pieces: he performed it innumerable times in the course of his concerts.

no. 2 in A flat maj.
no. 7 in A maj.
no. 6 in A min.

Performers

Performance