Liszt heard him, and like a flash the thought came to him: “What wonderful things might be done with the piano if its technical possibilities were developed as those of the violin have been by Paganini.” He performed tricks with harmonics, double stopping and treble stopping, arpeggios, springing bow, together with “guitar effects,” pizzicato and arco simultaneously, and other things that astonished not only “the natives” but rival violinists, who could not understand how he did them.
Niccolo Paganini arrived in Paris in March, 1831, on a tour which set all Europe aflame with wonder at the amazing brilliancy of his playing. What averted the calamity was Paganini’s violin playing. When we consider the many ways in which Liszt, during his long career, helped along music and musicians, we realize that it would have been nothing short of a calamity if, at the age of twenty-one, he had followed this inclination to become a priest. At one time he was so short of funds that he sold his piano to buy bread. From his early years his mind had been inclined toward religion but there were other reasons which affected him at this time, among them a disappointment in love, a long illness, an inborn aversion to the career of a public performer, and the necessity of giving lessons to support himself and his mother in Paris, because his recitals were not well-attended. What is strange is that he had an attack of this tæ dium vitæ when he was a mere youth-an attack so severe that he decided to say farewell to the musical world and enter the Church. He had become tired of life, having exhausted its joys as well as its sorrows. It is not strange that he repeatedly alluded in the letters of his last years to the tæ dium vitæ.
He lived a life crowded, as few lives have been, with hard work, romantic episodes, splendid triumphs, deep disappointments. Liszt's creative method can be observed in his reworking of the Etudes d' Exécution Transcendante d'après Paganini into the Grande Etudes de Paganini (better known as simply the Paganini Etudes), and the similar revision of the "Morceau de Salon" into "Ab Irato." The separate etudes cover a wide stylistic range, from the dazzling technical display of the most popular of the Paganini Etudes, "La Campanella," to the graceful, restrained lyricism of "Waldesrauschen." Each will bring to pianists and their listeners a moving encounter with the genius of this towering musical personality.Franz Liszt reached the ripe age of seventy-five.
#FRANZ LIST PAGANINI ETUDE SERIES#
This second volume, Series II, includes many of Liszt's most important piano works. This superbly produced yet inexpensive two-volume edition presents all of Liszt's etudes as edited by the great pianist, composer, and musical scholar Ferruccio Busoni for the Franz Liszt Society and published by Breitkopf and Härtel in Leipzig in 1910–11.
The undiminished popularity of his etudes with pianists and audiences alike have made them among the most performed and recorded works for solo piano in the romantic repertoire. Liszt's reputation as perhaps the greatest pianist of all time is powerfully supported by his dazzling body of work for solo piano.
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