Academic literature on the topic 'Liszt, Franz, – 1811-1886'

Franz Liszt eut de nombreux élèves tout particulièrement à l'Altenburg. Aloys Tausig vint s'y installer et y vécut deux ans. Mais auparavant les biographies, les correspondances diverses que Franz Liszt a échangées avec les personnalités musicales et littéraires de son temps, font mention à de nombreuses reprises de la présence à ses côtés d'un élève privilégié qui outre son enseignement partagea son intimité familiale. Hermann Cohen né en 1821, jeune pianiste prodige venu de Hambourg devint l'élève de Liszt en 1834 ; il rejoindra son maitre à Genève ou il se verra confier malgré son jeune âge une classe de piano au conservatoire nouvellement fondé. Ce séjour sera émaillé de nombreux concerts et se termina par une mémorable excursion racontée par George Sand dans les lettres d'un voyageur (vii et x). De retour à paris, il mène une carrière de concertiste et de professeur. Malheureusement sa vie dissolue et la passion du jeu le séparent de son maitre et il continue seul sa carrière. Touche par la grâce, il se convertit au catholicisme en 1847 et entre dans l'Ordre des Carmes Déchaussés. Il deviendra le père Augustin-Marie du Très-Saint-Sacrement, appelé le plus souvent père Hermann. Il se révèle un très brillant prédicateur, fonde plusieurs monastères, compose alors de la musique religieuse. Il mourut à Spandau le 20 janvier 1871 au service des prisonniers français. Dans le cadre de cette thèse, la gravure et l’édition de deux œuvres manuscrites de Hermann Cohen ont été réalisées : Les contretemps (1839), Les bords de l’Elbe (s. D) valse.

Through his exceptional creative and performing abilities, Franz Liszt was able to transform compositions of many kinds into unified, intelligible, and pleasing arrangements for piano. Nineteenth-century definitions of "arrangement" and "Klavierauszug," which focus on the process of reworking a composition for a different medium, do not adequately describe Liszt's work in this area. His piano transcriptions of Schubert's songs, Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique and the symphonies of Beethoven are not note-for-note transcriptions; rather, they reinterpret the originals in recasting them as compositions for solo piano. Writing about Liszt's versions of Schubert's songs, a Viennese critic identified as "Carlo" heralded Liszt as the creator of a new genre and declared him to have made Schubert's songs the property of cultured pianists. Moreover, Liszt himself designated his work with Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique and the symphonies of Beethoven "Partitions de piano": literally, piano scores. As is well known, concepts of genre in general create problems for musicologists; musical arrangements add a new dimension of difficulty to the problem. Whereas Carl Dahlhaus identifies genre as a tool for interpreting composers' responses to the social dimension of music in the fabric of individual compositions, Jeffrey Kallberg perceives it as a "social phenomenon shared by composers and listeners alike." The latter concept provides a more suitable framework for discussing the genre of transcriptions, for their importance derives in large part from relationships between the original and the derivative works, both as constructed by Liszt and perceived by critics and audiences. During the nineteenth and early twentieth century's, Liszt's transcriptions of songs and symphonies were construed as both compositions for pianists and subsets of the originals. Consequently, these compositions should be studied for their own musical value as well as for the light that they shed on the original works. Liszt's transcriptions are derivative and at the same time created distinct genres.

This study investigates Liszt's compositional style, and considers performance perspectives in his operatic paraphrases, Reminiscences de Don Juan and Valse de l'opera "Faust" de Charles Gounod. The great body of transcriptions by Liszt forms an important contribution to the development of piano music, combining technical challenges, innovative notation, dramatic projection, and pianistic effects. Reminiscences de Don Juan and Valse de l'opera "Faust" de Charles Gounod offer good examples of Liszt's genius in condensing an operatic score into a viable piano texture. Rather than offering simple medleys of popular arias, Liszt extracts the principal elements of the operas and creates a new art work from each. The relationship of his transcriptions to the original operas is carefully planned throughout. The artistic insight, creativity, and integrity Liszt devoted to these paraphrases extends to his use of the piano to evoke sonorities of both voices and orchestra, and in doing so, he expands the pianist's concept of the instrument. These transcriptions thus pose challenges beyond the purely technical, exploiting the performer's sense of drama, color and imagination in unique ways.

Thesis (D.M.A.)--University of North Texas, 2007.<br>System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Accompanied by 4 recitals, recorded Sept. 20, 2004, Oct. 24, 2005, Mar. 6, 2006, and Apr. 21, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (p. 41-42).

La passion de Liszt pour l'art en général révèle son imagination synesthésique : il ne peut regarder certaines œuvres sans les mettre spontanément en musique. Ses écrits, lettres et articles, révèlent sa culture et sa connaissance de l'art et du milieu artistique. Son texte sur la sainte Cécile de Raphae͏̈l dévoile ses réels talents de critique d'art, et son coup d'œil très sensible. La façon dont il parle du tableau nous a fait penser à la méthode de Panofsky, que nous avons donc choisi d'adapter à la musique de Liszt inspirée d'art visuel. Cette méthode procède en trois étapes, que Panofsky appelle niveaux de signification. Le premier niveau concerne tout l'aspect matériel immédiatement perceptible : formes, volumes, couleurs. Le pendant musical est les motifs et thèmes employés. Le deuxième niveau s'attache aux images, histoires et allégories contenues dans un tableau. Là encore, elles correspondent chez Liszt à une thématique signifiante : il évoque des personnages par des citations, telles que le Stella Matutina pour Sainte Elisabeth. Le troisième niveau considère le contenu d'une œuvre. Liszt l'exprime par la forme. Après avoir abordé l'ensemble de ses œuvres ainsi conçues, nous avons opté pour l'analyse exhaustive de celles qui donnent une idée de la variété de l'écriture de Liszt : Sposalizio, Totentanz, Von der Wieger bis zum Graber. Elles reflètent ses préoccupations principales, la religion et la mort. L'adaptation de la méthode de Panofsky pour l'analyse des œuvres de Liszt inspirées de l'art visuel met en évidence la similitude ou les divergences des principes de perception et de conception. Elle montre également que le contenu commun des œuvres réside dans l'idée qu'elles illustrent<br>Liszt's passion for art in general testifies to his synaesthetic imagination -he could not look at certain works without spontaneously setting them to music. His writings, letters and articles convey his culture and knowledge of art and artistic circles. His work on Raphael's Sainte Cécile reveals his true talent as an art critic and his highly sensitive eye. The way he speaks about this painting is reminischent of Panofsky's approach, which is adapted here to Liszt's music as inspired by the visual arts. .

In 1970, the Hungarian publishing firm Editio Musica Budapest began a long term project, ending in 2005, that endeavored to compile and publish all Liszt's works in a complete edition titled, The New Liszt Edition (NLE). Through the efforts of this firm, Liszt's Technical Studies were published in the way that he had originally intended for the first time in 1983. Yet, although the eminent Liszt-scholar Michael Saffle has stated that 'Pedagogy is one of the most thoroughly-mined veins of Liszt material ever uncovered', academic discussions on Liszt's Technical Studies (Walker, 2005), his definitive pedagogical work for piano, are scarce. What it was that Liszt set out as being fundamental to the acquisition of pianistic virtuosity in the Technical Studies and the nature of its trajectory is generally unknown. Through an examination of the didactic instruction Liszt supplied in the Preface of the autograph manuscript to the Technical Studies and specific technical commentaries written by Mme. Auguste Boissier in her Liszt pedagogue, I will argue that the Technical Studies are built on six artistic and mechanical principles, exemplified by Liszt in the exercises, written to help the pianist acquire technical virtuosity. The methodical divisions of the work into sections that deal with specific mechanical objectives are illustrated with musical examples and their technical trajectory defined.

The dissertation examines Liszt's experimentation with harmonic, formal, and programmatic procedures in the piano works of his Weimar period (1848--1861). Liszt's music has often been criticized as "new wine in old bottles." His radical development of keyboard technique and harmonic vocabulary appears contained within, and constrained by, traditional forms. Here, however, it is argued that Liszt's "form" and "content" go hand in hand. A change in one compositional element (e.g., harmonic vocabulary) leads to changes in other elements (e.g., formal and tonal design), so that a kind of compositional "chain reaction" occurs.<br>Chapter one (introduction) establishes the plan of study and describes three organizational strategies ("conflict," "block," and "object") found in the selected works. Chapter two investigates the Etudes d'execution transcendante and focuses on harmonic innovations at the thematic level. In comparing different versions of the Etudes, the chapter shows how the composer's virtuoso keyboard idiom interacts with harmonic content and how surface harmonic procedures function as structural determinants. Chapter three concentrates on the smaller sets of "poetic" piano works. These include the Consolations , the Liebestraume, and the two Ballades as well as selections from the larger cyclical collections, the Annees de pelerinage and the Harmonies poetiques et religieuses. The analytical focus is on Liszt's manipulations of phrase- and section-level formal functions. The works display strophic and through-compositional tendencies that mirror developments in nineteenth-century lieder, and formal ambiguities that arise from the hybridization of traditional instrumental formal types.<br>Chapter four focuses exclusively on the B-minor Sonata. The composition, perhaps Liszt's most successful and complex work, engages us in a synthetic approach to harmony, form, and programme. The motivic and formal design of the Sonata may be accounted for in programmatic terms. Compositional similarities between the Sonata and the Faust Symphony suggest their shared programmatic subtext. The extensively developed "love interest" in Goethe's Faust invokes issues of gender and sexuality. The programme-related construction of gender as well as the arousal and channeling of desire can be connected with the Sonata's formal and tonal organization. Emphasizing the use of five motives and their various transformations, it is shown how Liszt portrays, through musical means, the three principal characters---Faust, Marguerite, and Mephistopheles---and how the work embodies a variety of narratological and interpretive paradigmsheroic, feminist, and psychological.

Undoubtedly, Totentanz has been one of the most famous works by Franz Liszt. Totentanz has been recorded by many pianists and addressed in much of the vast literature about Liszt and his works; however, little research has been focused on this work. Most studies of Totentanz address only the historical background of the piece in relation to the theme based on Dies irae. Currently, there are no specific studies about the solo piano or two piano versions and only one recording was located. Liszt's own piano solo transcription of this famous work is an excellent addition to the concert repertoire. Totentanz consists of six variations that include canonic and fugato sections. The main theme is based on the Gregorian chant Dies irae, a melody that has been used by many other composers, most notably Berlioz in Witches Sabbath of Symphonie fantastique, op. 14 and Rachmaninoff in Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. This study contains five chapters. Chapters I and II provide background information, historical background and influences of Totentanz. Chapter III presents an outline of Liszt's achievement as a transcriber. Liszt revised his own works numerous times from the 1840s and 1850s, including Transcendental Etudes, Paganini Etudes, and piano and orchestra works. Like in the case of Totentanz, transcribed form piano and orchestra into piano solo, Liszt transcribed and paraphrased hundreds of other composers' works as well. Chapter IV discusses and compares the two main versions for solo piano and piano and orchestra. Form and harmonic language in particular the use of tritone in Totentanz is discussed. The adjustment required in transcribing the work for piano solo is discussed in detail, followed by a conclusion.