Week 2: Your First Check-in
You’ve chosen your Liszt piece. Now the adventure really begins.
This week is all about getting inside the music without worrying about perfection yet. Liszt’s music can feel grand, poetic, dramatic, intimate, or completely overwhelming, sometimes all within the same page.
For this week, we’d love for you to share:
- Early practice clips
- First impressions of your piece
- Passages you’re struggling with
- Musical moments you already love
- Questions or discoveries from practice
- How Liszt feels under your hands so far
A few ideas to focus on this week:
- Finding a comfortable starting tempo
- Practicing smaller sections instead of full run-throughs
- Looking for patterns in the texture
- Identifying one or two “problem spots”
- Finding the main melody inside thick textures
Whether you’re working on a Consolation, a transcription, a Hungarian Rhapsody, a piece from Years of Pilgrimage, or a short excerpt from a larger work, we’re excited to hear your first steps into Liszt’s world.
Looking forward to seeing what everyone is discovering this week!
41 replies
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Since I am part of the Transcendental Etudes faction, I have started working on my Etudes a few months ago (then stopped for other projects!), and in the following weeks will be aiming to polish them as much as I can.
Here is an early version of the Preludio. The most challenging part is near the end, with fast arpeggios all on white keys, very difficult to play accurately. I practice it (and everything!) in groups of notes. In this recording you can hear that the arpeggios part is still in groups , so doesn't sound as fluid as it should. Training wheels still on!
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https://youtube.com/shorts/mwMOUt_R0Rk?is=06KtWZC22PtYtDiS
I studied this etude S136/2 for a while… aiming to improve my collapsing knuckle joints. I’ve been trying to use it as a study piece for a longer period on and off. My teacher told me that this etude will stretch hands and be a remedy for my problems.
Honestly, I don’t know if this etude is helping my issue. This challenge rescued me from despair 😔 Good to have a purpose in our practice. So thank you friends & TB.
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I've spent a bit of time organizing how I will work on the Eroica etude. I have divided it into 7 sections (A-G on the attached .pdf if anyone wants to see the score and sections.
The piece is essentially an introduction, a short series of strophes leading to an apotheosis, and a coda. My practice sections align with this general form as follows:
Practice Section A - Introduction (mm. 1-18)
Practice Section B - Strophe 1a (mm. 19-44)
Practice Section C - Strophe 1b (mm. 45-62)
Practice Section D - Strophe 2a (mm. 63-74)
Practice Section E - Strophe 2b (mm. 75-86)
Practice Section F - Strophe 3 / Apotheosis (mm. 87-102)
Practice Section G - Coda (mm. 103-end)
My goal this week is to record practice clips of each of these sections. I'm not aiming for a flawless take, just a fairly stable run through of each section to ensure security across the piece and start moving toward memorization. Below I have included my recording for section A and will update as I record the other sections.
Section A - Introduction (July 11)
In this introduction, Liszt is playing around with diminished 7th chords and their chromatic flexibility. mm. 12-18 are surprisingly tricky as 12-15 and 16-18 are just the same diminished 7th being resolved differently; in 12-15 it chromatically resolves to a D7 chord whereas in 16-18 it resolves chromatically to a B7 chord. This slight difference is actually surprisingly disorienting to get the fingers around!
Section B - Strophe 1a (July 12)
Here the theme is introduced. This section can be played using the sostenuto to sustain the march themes notes while the staccato chords are played. I am not using it here though, partly because I'm not sure I want to and partly because my sostenuto needs adjusting as a few notes are not engaging properly at the moment. The challenge here is primarily the ping ponging back and forth accurately.
Section C - Strophe 1b (July 12)
Things start to ramp up a bit here. I am still deciding just how much pedal I want to use with the strum-like chords. The thematic material shifts to the left hand and the arpeggiations in the RH are challenging to play rapidly and lightly against the LH.
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Thank you for this challenge. I have attached a video of the final page of the Prelude which is the most challenging. My piece is the Prelude and Fugue in A minor by Bach transcribed by Liszt. I am definitely playing the Prelude and possibly the Fugue.
I have also attached a very slow video of the Prelude
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I had intended to post a practice video illustrating my current status of Vision, but I've had a very full day, musically speaking (a 1.5-hour voice lesson, a 2-hour piano lesson, and 2-3 hours of practicing), plus rounding at the hospital in the morning and being on call all day, so you'll forgive me if I say: I just can't. Not tonight. However: I can share some insights. First of all, the beginning of the piece is harder than I had anticipated since my piano teacher disabused me of the notion that some of the 32nd note figures in the first 12 measures can be played with the right hand. They cannot (must not)! Much of the first half of this etude is intended to train the left hand. This makes for some very awkward leaps indeed. Oh, well. The other problem are the very wide arpeggi in the right hand: I mostly get them, except for the top notes. Even for my fairly large hands, those are difficult to reach with the pinky. More wrist flexibility and forearm movement will be needed here. "La souplesse avant tout!", to quote the Master. Then the choreography of it all: one is constantly tempted to just pay attention to whichever hand is the busiest in that moment (in other words, whichever hand plays the fast arpeggio) and not remember that in the meantime, the other hand needs to get where it needs to be by the next beat. To make those alternating movements fluid and evenly "swinging" takes some work. Finally, my section of the piece ends in an octave passage; it's not particularly hard, but it needs to be brought into a Lisztian tempo, with the proper bravura sound. So, I have my work cut out for me. I hope to post a practice video next week when I'm a little less sleep deprived.
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Does your teacher know that many (most?) pianists, including Trifonov, Lim, and Berezovsky (!!), play some of those 32nd notes with the RH? Maybe it could be discussed on the next "difficult passages" live stream if there's one before the end of this challenge 😬.
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yes, I am sure he does, but since, believe it or not, my level of technical and artistic proficiency STILL lies and languishes several levels below that of the great artists you have mentioned, I think he wants me to derive as much strict-adherence, tough-love, old-school, what-doesn’t-kill-you-makes-you-stronger technical benefit from this étude (which took a lot of gentle coaxing from me to convince him to even look at and work on in my lesson in the first place since it is not, ahem, cough, a piece of music he would have chosen or considered of value for me) as possible.
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It boggles my mind that you can take on so many challenges. Bravo!
Is your master French?
My master is French. She is my wife, though, and not my piano teacher.
Flexibility above all. That does seem like a good motto.
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RE: the first 12 measures can be played with the right hand. They cannot (must not)!
Alexander, how lucky you are to have a teacher who is instilling in you the proper way to play. I pray daily for such a teacher to exist and come my way.
Out of the handful of Liszt Etudes that I'm signed up to eventually learn, Vision is one of them. So I have already fiddled around with it already. When you mentioned you tried to use your right hand for the left hand figuration's, I was interested since I wondered if I was not seeing the trick or convenience of doing this as well. The quarter notes of the right hand though would be why I wouldn't go down that path.
I too sometimes have to bend the rules of convention to make something seemingly impossible work for my hands but these days my obsession seems to be on first trying to be as close as possible to accuracy (of what is written). But this is Liszt and so many things are beyond comprehension sometimes.
For instance, in bar 17 and beyond, my intellectual eye sees that top eighth note in the RH and would want to hold it for the full value that it is written for. But it is probably nigh impossible. I would even probably consider a LH crossover here to do so. We'll see?
I know that this is super tedious to some. Absolutely, I understand. Most listeners would probably not care or give this the time of day of concern. I know! But I know, and that's all that matters. ;-)
And this is probably a good reason why I'm concerned that my stated goal for 2 decades (2046) is now worrying me if I will have enough time to work all the details out ;-). Ha ha.
Thank you for your updates and comments about your progress on these works. I find it all very interesting and applaud you and others for taking on these challenges.
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RE: For instance, in bar 17 and beyond,....
Sorry, scratch this comment about using the LH at top. I misspoke here. The reason is the LH quarter note. Here, I believe you can't actually hold the RH eighth but it is possible to highlight the note.
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😂 no, with “master”, I was referring to Liszt himself. “Souplesse Avant Tout” reportedly was his motto.
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RE. “Souplesse Avant Tout”
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How slow do you have to play the first 12 bars to play them well without "cheating" with the RH? Too slow? I'm sure you will be able to increase the tempo eventually, but it certainly doesn't have to be fast anyway!
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