Classical Music | Piano Music

Franz Liszt

Il Trovatore – Paraphrase de Concert  Play

Alexandre Dossin Piano

Recorded on 07/25/2005, uploaded on 01/11/2009

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

 

Besides his prolific output as a composer, Franz Liszt also actively promoted the music of his contemporaries. One way in which he did this was by composing pieces based on the melodies of other composers, as he did with three operas by Giuseppe Verdi: Rigoletto, Il Trovatore and Ernani. Dubbed “paraphrases” by Liszt, these works brought attention to the composer whose melodies were used. Yet, Liszt’s ostentatious presentation of them often damaged his own reputation as a composer. The end result of these paraphrases, however, is a unique fusion of Liszt’s and Verdi’s styles—Liszt no doubt bends somewhat to accommodate Verdi’s melodies, while those melodies nevertheless seem to eerily adopt a Lisztian mien. Yet, the listener at the end feels he or she has heard more from Liszt than Verdi.

Miserere du Trovatore, composed in 1854, is based on a duet between Leonore and Manrico from Act IV of Verdi’s Il Trovatore. Manrico is condemned to die and the music focuses more on his impending death than Leonore’s and Manrico’s love for each other. Liszt establishes this bleak outlook from the first measure, imitating the tolling of bells (a death knell) with tones in the lowest register of the piano. Marked in A-flat major, but actually beginning in its parallel minor, dramatic and weighted music with a pervasive march rhythm forms the introduction. After a close on the dominant, the music shifts to the major mode and the principal melody appears amidst a gentle accompaniment of triplets. The reassuring tone of this cantando section is but short-lived as menacing semitone tremolandi begin in the bass and lead to a more threatening rendition of the music from the introduction. Balancing this turbulent section, the cantando melody returns in even sweeter guise, starting almost inaudibly but setting in motion the ensuing coda. Building passionately on motives heard earlier, the coda passes through the keys of B major and D major in its fervent drive onward. The ominous mood of the beginning returns in a chromatically descending bass underneath arpeggios of the tonic chord and the piece ends in an uncertain manner as the presence of a flattened sixth scale degree thwarts the optimistic closing tonic chords.      Joseph DuBose

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Concert Paraphrase on Themes of Il Trovatore                     Franz Liszt

Liszt's admiration for Verdi's operas is evident in the number of transcriptions and paraphrases he wrote. The work we hear today was written in 1858 and uses several themes from the opera. Liszt makes wonderful use of the lowest register of the piano, imitating the sad tolling of the bells in the introduction, accompanying the Miserere. He uses a famous pianistic texture from the 1830s: the 3-hand technique. Three layers are present at the same time (in the lower, middle and higher register of the instrument) giving the impression that the pianist is using three hands.      Alexandre Dossin

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Good Job!

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