Sometimes even Romantic geniuses can use an extra hand.
This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” on the eve of the anniversary of the birth of Franz Liszt (born October 22, 1811), we’ll have several works in which Liszt was aided and abetted by his peers.
While it’s true that, early on, Liszt possessed a degree of insecurity over his ability to orchestrate – after all, he had been largely a “keyboard” composer, enlisting the aid of pupils like Joachim Raff and Franz Doppler during his years as a conductor in Weimar – Liszt quickly mastered the art himself and set about revising every bar of his earlier orchestral compositions, stamping them very much with his own distinctive voice.
The story behind Liszt’s “Concerto in the Hungarian Style,” however, is quite a different matter.
German pianist Sophie Menter studied with Liszt in Weimar, from 1869. Her gift was such that Liszt dubbed her “the greatest pianist of her day.” He admired her “singing hand” and called her his “only legitimate daughter as a pianist.” George Bernard Shaw compared her favorably to Paderewski. She was by Liszt’s side in Bayreuth when he died in 1886.
Menter taught at the St. Petersburg Conservatory between 1883 and 1887. There, she became friendly with Tchaikovsky and convinced him to orchestrate a piano concerto she said she had written to showcase her talents as a performer. Tchaikovsky did so and also dedicated the orchestral score of his own “Concert Fantasy” to her.
What he didn’t realize – and what is now widely believed (according to Menter, who confided it to a friend and fellow Liszt pupil, Vera Timanoff) – is that the piece was actually written, at least in part, by Liszt himself. Had Tchaikovsky known, he may very well have torn up the manuscript. He had come to loathe Liszt, and was particularly disgusted by Liszt’s transcription of the Polonaise from “Eugene Onegin.” But the truth – if truth it be – didn’t emerge, for nearly a hundred years, and Tchaikovsky conducted the first performance of the work in Odessa in 1893.
Roll over Beethoven, tell Tchaikovsky the news…
Alongside this colorful concerto by Menter’s mentor, we’ll also hear “The Black Gondola” (orchestrated by John Adams about a century after Liszt’s death); “Hexameron,” a titanic set of piano variations with contributions from six virtuoso superstars of the 1830s, including Liszt, Carl Czerny, Sigismond Thalberg, and Frederic Chopin; and a selection from the ballet “Apparitions,” engineered in 1936 by Constant Lambert and Gordon Jacob.
Liszt gets by with a little help from his friends, on “An Assist for Liszt,” this Sunday night at 10:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
