Classical Music | Piano Music

Recorded on 05/01/1977, uploaded on 10/19/2014

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

...One of the most popular pieces of Première année, Au bord d’un source (Beside a Spring) is also one of the more technically challenging. The picturesque scene of the piece is described in the quote taken from Schiller which Liszt chose to preface the piece: “In the whispering coolness begins young nature’s play.” As in Au Lac de Wallenstadt, the sound of water is here again imitated in the undercurrent of sixteenth notes that accompany the principal theme itself. An interesting feature of the accompaniment is the nearly ubiquitous seconds that its forms with the notes of the theme, which are later resolved as its characteristic pattern of broken chords unfolds. Furthermore, while the right hand manages these two contrasting lines, the left adds a further degree of technical difficulty with staccato notes that require it at times to leap over the active right hand. The piece is sectioned off into varied statements of the theme, creating the semblance of a quasi-variation form, and which are separated by brief, florid measures of passagework. Despite the technical demands made upon the performer during the successive variations, perhaps the most challenging is passing it all off in the calm, effortless manner required by the piece’s imagery. One of the pieces revised from his earlier Album d’un voyageur, Liszt produced a third version of Au bord d’un source in 1863 for one of his piano students, which replaced its serene ending with a virtuosic coda.      Joseph DuBose

Recorded in May of 1977