Coincidentally, this recital comprises a pair of works that define the boun- daries of the most fabulous career in pianistic history. The six Etudes d'Exécution Transcendante d'après Paganini, as they were called originally, date from 1838 ; Liszt's affair with the Countess d'Agoult was breaking up and soon he would throw himself into a decade of sublimative travel and triumph. The Trois Etudes de Concert were set down in 1848 ; now he had renounced public life and was ensconced idyllically with the Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein. Notwithstanding the obvious, it would be a risky business to set up any qualitative polarity as between the "pre" and the "post" attributes that must be respectively inherent. Liszt's awe of his demon-fiddler contemporary was sincere, and the internal evidence of the Paganini transcriptions reveals them as the skillful homage of one great artist to another, perforce impersonal in their painstaking fidelity to the prototypes and hence atypical of the familiar Lisztian sentiments, either early or late. On the other hand, the expansively Chopinesque character of the subsequent triptych clearly reflects the rediscovered bliss that so often inspired the old thunderer in his semi-retirement at Weimar ; Sacheverell Sitwell accounts this golden interval "the most productive period of his genius as composer". Properly, however, neither work can be said to represent a chronological stage in Liszt's creative development Whatever he had to give, he had to give from the beginning — an extraordinary sense of musical theater, lent spirit by an indomitably individual temperament and lent substance by an inexhaustible, if not unflagging, resource of romantic imagination. In short he was a melodramatist always, and this was his weakness as well as his strength. Mostly it was his strength, for it was the fountainhead of a uniquely coruscating magic that marks him yet as the only true virtuoso-composer in all annals of the art. Liszt's fruitful identification with his violinistic opposite number began in 1831, when he heard him in Paris for the first time. An immediate result was the Grande Fantaisie de Bravoure sur la Clochette de Paganini, which was based on the rondo theme (otherwise known as La Campanella) of the latter's Concerto n° 2 in B Minor, Opus 7. Liszt's authorized biographer, Lina Ramann, has it that he intended also to transcribe the twenty-four Paganini Caprices, Opus 1. This is altogether a reasonable proposition ; we know that a set of twelve actually were announced for publication. Unfortunately, no autograph fragments are extant beyond the five that, with another take-off on La Campanella, make up the so-called "Paganini Etudes". Certain unreconstructed Lisztophiles insist that‘ the earliest edition of the Etudes d'Exécution etc., which appeared in 1840 (the year of Paganini's death), remains the only bona fide and wholly acceptable version for all its admittedly impossible difficulties. The truth is that Liszt himslf supplanted it, in 1851, with what was advertised as the "seule édition authentique, entièrement revue et corrigée par l'auteur". Long afterward the three available forms of the fourth Etude — three because the original edition had itself contained alternate settings—were brought out independently with an analytic preface by the Liszt pupil Eduard Reuss...
(From the original Liner Notes)
Edith Farnadi
Plays
Franz Liszt
(1811-1886)
Tracks
Grandes études de Paganini, S. 141
1 N° 1. Preludio. Andante - Étude. Non troppo lento (G minor) 4:42
2 N° 2. Andante (E-Flat major) 5:10
3 N° 3. La Campanella. Allegretto (G-Sharp minor) 4:37
4 N° 4. Vivo (E major) 2:19
5 N° 5. Allegretto (E major) 3:03
6 N° 6. Quasi presto (A minor) 5:20
Études de concert, S. 144
7 N° 1. Il lamento (A-Flat major) 9:14
8 N° 2. La leggierezza (F minor) 4:43
9 N° 3. Un sospiro (D-Flat major) 5:38
*
Edith Farnadi - p
Recorded ca 1962