When Franz Liszt died in 1883, his housekeeper allowed his students to go through his belongings and carry off manuscripts to keep as mementos. Just over a hundred years later, in 1989, parts of a previously unknown piano concerto were retrieved from Weimar, Nuremberg, and Leningrad. These were reunited by University of Chicago doctoral candidate Jay Rosenblatt.
Scholars had simply assumed that the fragments were from an early draft of the much-beloved Piano Concerto No. 1. In reality, it is a “Third Piano Concerto” now believed to predate the accepted two. The work has not entered the standard repertoire, but it remains an interesting curiosity.
One of the few pianists to take up the piece has been Rosenblatt’s teacher, Jerome Lowenthal, born in Philadelphia on this date in 1932. Here is Lowenthal’s recording of the work:
Interestingly, it took the better part of a century for the truth about another lesser-known Liszt concerto to emerge.
Sophie Menter had studied with Liszt in Weimar, beginning in 1869. So gifted a musician was she that Liszt described her as “the greatest pianist of her day.” He praised her “singing hand” and called her his “only legitimate daughter as a pianist.” She was by her teacher’s side when he died in Bayreuth in 1886.
At the time, she held a professorship at the St. Petersburg Conservatory There, she became friendly with Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky. She asked Tchaikovsky to orchestrate a piano concerto she claimed that she herself had written, to showcase her talents as a performer. Tchaikovsky agreed, and also dedicated his own “Concert Fantasy for Piano and Orchestra” to her.
What he didn’t realize is that the concerto – according to Menter’s friend, fellow Liszt pupil Vera Timanoff, to whom Menter allegedly confided – was actually composed by Liszt. Had Tchaikovsky known, he might very well have torn up the manuscript. He loathed Liszt, and was especially disgusted by Liszt’s transcription of the Polonaise from “Eugene Onegin.” As it was, Tchaikovsky conducted the work’s first performance in Odessa in 1893.
Here is the “Concerto in the Hungarian Style” – formerly known as the “Sophie Menter Concerto” – performed by Janina Fialkowska, the same pianist who gave the first public performance of Liszt’s “Third Piano Concerto” in 1990:
As an addendum, György Cziffra plays the Liszt transcription that Tchaikovsky so despised.
In classical music, sometimes it’s not so much who you know, as who you don’t know that matters!
Clockwise from left: Franz Liszt, Sophie Menter, Janina Fialkowska, and birthday boy Jerome Lowenthal
