Franz Liszt - Sonetto 104 del Petrarca, S.161/5 (Módica) 

Thanks!

Thanks!

Fact. Shame that most people fail to realize that.

@@BBB-hi4hc Indeed! Nowadays people seem perfectly content with pounding through La Campanella, but some people don’t even bother with some of the most genuinely wonderful pieces in Liszt’s more standard output, let alone other gems. Even La Campanella can be played with great generosity and nobility, as demonstrated by Liszt’s pupil Emil von Sauer. The E-flat concerto is also definitely an example of a piece that people tend to use as a showboating vehicle as opposed to valuing its musical content. Even Horowitz, who could paint a beautiful portrait in the Clementi F-sharp minor sonata, could not resist cheapening Liszt’s B minor Ballade, one of his great masterpieces, with an impressive but overblown cadenza.

This piece is played very frequently. The other two Petrarch Sonnets are also played, but this one is the most famous.

It is quite a popular piece indeed. Liszt was indeed a very prolific composer-but he had for years been pigeonholed who were convinced the music of Liszt were nonsense. It is thanks to the efforts of the likes of Egon Petri (Busoni’s towering disciple) and more recently Earl Wild (who studied with Petri) that we take Liszt seriously as a great composer. The melodic sweep, the lush harmonies all speaks to the soul, and it becomes very clear Liszt was continuing the idea of innovation right where Beethoven, Weber and Schubert had left off. This particular piece was recorded by many a good pianist - Egon Petri, Earl Wild, and of course Vladimir Horowitz (in his own overblown transcription, not unexpected of Horowitz, but he has the risk of being stylistically tasteless in Liszt; anyways Horowitz’s art is more visible in Clementi, but that’s a story for another time).