Edited Scores

This edition comprises the first six parts of the early version of the the cycle Harmonies poétiques et religieuses by Franz Liszt. These piano pieces, written down in Sketchbook N9 kept in the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv at Weimar (GSA 60/N9), were created in late 1847, when Franz Liszt was a guest in the wooden country house of Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein near the village Woronince (Woronowce) in the Ukraine.

This volume comprises all the piano works from the first phase of the genesis of the cycle Harmonies poétiques et religieuses. First of all the piano piece of that name from 1833. Then the first version of Hymne de l’enfant à son réveil, inspired by the homonymous poem by Lamartine. However, the majority of the pieces, published here for the first time, came into being in the autumn of 1845, shortly after the definitive break with Marie d’Agoult.

Hymne de l’enfant à son réveil occupies a special place in the group of piano pieces assembled under the title Harmonies poétiques et réligieuses. For there exist no less than six versions of this composition: three for piano and three for choir. The three choral versions date from 1862, 1865 and 1874. Of these only the last was available in print. The present edition represents the first publication of 1862 (‘Rome, 18 Février’).

The current edition is the first printed edition of an unknown sonata by C. P. E. Bach. There are two versions of this early work, from 1736 and 1744, respectively. These are first given in Urtext and then as an annotated score (with added articulation, dynamics, fingering, etc.). With an extensive preface, a text-critical commentary and observations concerning interpretation. Both versions are recorded on cd AB I-07.

The three works published here for the first time all stem from Liszt’s sketchbook N6, kept in the Goethe- and Schiller-Archiv in Weimar. The works concerned are: a Largo in B minor, Essai sur l’indifférence in E-flat major and Mazeppa, a composition in F minor that has nothing to do with the famous study of that name. The three sketches show that between 1829 and 1833 the young composer was developing his style in many ways.

Frédéric Chopin wrote his Introduction et Polonaise brillante for cello and piano, Opus 3, in 1829-30. When exactly Carl Czerny made a transcription for solo piano is not known, but the plate number of the first edition, published by Pietro Mechetti in Vienna, points to the end of the 1830s. In France in particular, this arrangement has been considered for decades as being written by Chopin himself.

When I for the first time did research in the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv in Weimar in 1986, I found a sketch that evidently had to do with the genesis of the Mazeppa study. The sketch was written on two pages. Inserting these 20 bars in the early version of the Mazeppa study (1841) an intermediate version arises, the ‘missing link’ between that early version and the final one from 1851.

Valse pour Marie is the only composition by Franz Liszt that is certain to have been written on Dutch soil: the work was created in the days after his arrival in The Hague at the end of November 1842. The composition was never prepared for publication, the reason why after the Urtext – the notes as one finds them in the manuscript – a fully written-out and annotated version follows.