Week 1: Choose your piece!
Welcome to the Lisztomaniac Challenge — and the start of our Liszt adventure!
Franz Liszt is one of the most exciting, imaginative, and influential composers in the piano repertoire. When many people hear “Liszt,” they immediately think of impossible virtuosity, flying octaves, and the great showpieces.
And yes, some participants will be taking on those works during this challenge!
But Liszt wrote music for pianists of many different levels, and this challenge is about exploring all corners of his music.
Whether you’re learning a Consolation, a short piece from Years of Pilgrimage, a Liebestraum, a Hungarian Rhapsody, or even one of the great virtuoso masterpieces, there’s a place for you here.
This Week’s Goal
Choose one Liszt piece, or one excerpt, to stay with throughout the challenge.
A few ideas:
- A piece you’ve always wanted to learn
- A shorter Liszt work that feels approachable
- A beautiful excerpt from a larger dream piece
- A piece that challenges your sound, imagination, or technique
- One of the big virtuoso works, if you’re feeling bold
This Week, Share:
What piece did you choose?
Why this piece?
- What draws you to Liszt’s music?
- Is there a musical or technical challenge you hope to work through this month?
If you’d like, post a recording of where you’re starting from, even if it’s just a rough first read. We’d love to hear it.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll explore Liszt’s sound world together and make meaningful progress, wherever we are in our musical journey.
Let the Lisztomania begin!
44 replies
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Hi! Thanks a lot for the challenge!
I have always loved and admired Liszt, especially as a teenager. Back then, I even read some of his biographies and was quite immersed. Now, am less enthusiastic, which is mainly due to lacking technical skills and maybe even courage to approach his works with diligence and passion. However, his music fascinates me still. I have learned some of his organ works and find them quite unique.
For the challenge, I’m in with Harmonies du soir, but that will be (hopefully) presentable in October only. My last months have been extremely busy with non-musical stuff, so I’m quite behind the piano schedule I thought I could keep despite everything else. And the piece touches my ceiling of technical ability.
For this month (and as a little diversion and warm-up), I’m choosing Paganini-etude No.5. -
Hello friends
as outlined previously, I am preparing measures 1-17 of Chasse neige for the October challenge, and it’s definitely progressing ,
for the upcoming challenge at the end of this month , I will present Liebestraum no3 , I’m enjoying this piece a lot even though it’s possibly overplayed generally.
I’ve just watched a video of Arthur Rubinstein performing it splendidly but he spends half the piece staring at the ceiling or into outer space, I don’t think I’ll be doing that ……
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As correctly listed by , my main project for this month are measures 1-31 of "Vision". I personally think they're coming along nicely, but it IS Liszt, so I may be in for a rude awakening when Noel and I will try out our collaboration on this piece for the first time in a couple of weeks. In addition, I plan to submit an Encore at the end of this month for the watch party: Liszt's elegy "Die Zelle in Nonnenwerth" S. 534 ii/a (the "ii/a" after the Searle catalogue number refers to the version; Liszt wrote no less than five piano versions of this piece which began its life as a song composed on the words of a poem, "Nonnnenwerth", written by his friend and travel companion, Prince Felix von Lichnowsky).
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Hi, everyone. I've chosen Liszt's Etude S.136, No. 2 because I practiced this etude with my teacher. As you know the Étude en douze exercices, S.136, is the youthful origin of his legendary Transcendental Études. It was written in 1826 when Liszt was only 15 years old.
The version I'm learning and planning to post is still highly challenging for me. S.136, No. 2 is written in 3/4 time, but I have difficulty feeling the pulse. Another difficulty is creating dynamics, playing arpeggios in unison. I will do my best! :)
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said:
It has been fun to hear Thurmond learn this one.Is he planning to record it (Vision) for the challenge?
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Hi everyone! As mentioned in the list, I've volunteered for Mazeppa (TE #4).
My timing was a little off, and I decided to focus on Liszt last year (2025). At the outset, I had zero plans to work on Mazeppa since it's such a reach piece. As the year progressed and I familiarized myself with more of his works, I decided to take the plunge and give it a try, with the goal of playing it from memory at about 10min.
Here's a private (overpedalled, shaky-memory) recording of approximately where I left off at the end of 2025: https://youtu.be/T8r6cgn_LRo?si=ROsrh3O56P7c8UEa (it looks like I was still using the 4-2 4-2 fingering for the thirds)
It's been a bit on the back burner this year until Noel suggested the TE challenge. Now that it's in my long-term memory, I'm taking this month to focus on musical cohesiveness, sound quality and accuracy at a slower tempo. My hope is as I create more dynamic range and flow, the tempo will naturally move forward as needed.
As an amateur with no performance obligations, it's both liberating to work on whatever I want, but also tough to have the discipline to work on a piece for more than a couple of months. I'm really thankful for this Lisztomaniac challenge for the motivation to focus/refocus on this piece for much longer than I normally would!
I'm also excited to hear you all work on pieces - so many of which were not on my radar last year.