Franz Liszt was a man of paradoxes and extremes who could only have flourished in the Romantic period. He was both a superficial showman and contemplative artist, mystic and hedonist, genius and poseur, saint and sinner. He broke many a commandment and many a heart, exhibiting incredible flamboyance in his virtuoso piano performances before adoring audiences, yet longing for a life of religious asceticism. He fathered numerous illegitimate offspring but ended up taking minor orders in the Catholic Church with the right to the title Abbé Liszt. He witnessed first-hand the cultural and musical transformation of Europe but unfortunately never wrote his life’s memoirs, being “too busy living it.”

Like most of Liszt’s compositions, the First Piano Concerto had a long gestation with the earliest sketches dating from 1830. Liszt completed it in 1849, only to revise it twice more before the publication in 1856. Liszt had a lifelong penchant for either creating innovative musical forms or breathing new life into classic ones. In listening to this well-known work, consider how different it is in form and musical development from the more classic mid-century concerti of Mendelssohn, Schumann or Brahms.

The concerto is played without a pause but still comprises four distinct movements, which are also linked thematically. It opens Allegro maestoso with a majestic theme, or motto, on the strings, from which Liszt derived all the other themes in the work. When once asked about the meaning of this theme, Liszt sat down at the piano and sang to it: “Das versteht Ihr alle nicht” (None of you understands that), without any further elaboration. The piano enters almost at once with a series of bravura passages in octaves followed by a spectacular solo display. As the opening section fades into silence, the second movement, Quasi adagio, opens with a dreamy melody on muted strings, which is taken up by the piano in a cantilena that has been compared to a Bellini aria. 

The witty third section, Allegretto vivace, is the equivalent of a classical scherzo and introduces a delicate rhythm played on the triangle that raised the ire of the staid Viennese of the nineteenth century, especially that of the dean of music critics, the acerbic Eduard Hanslick, who called it derisively the “Triangle Concerto.” A piano cadenza on the opening theme serves as a bridge to the fourth section, Allegro marziale animato, in which all the themes from the Adagio and Allegretto are combined ingeniously for a grand recapitulation.

Program notes by:
Joseph & Elizabeth Kahn
Wordpros@mindspring.com
www.wordprosmusic.com