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!
111 replies
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I am working on Liszt’s transcription of Frühlingsglaube by Schubert. Here is a first recording of the beginning. It is really all about making the piano sing. A lot of voicing I have to work on: Upper right hand, upper left hand, sometimes split up between both hands. This part is still very close to the original Schubert song. The real work is still to come 😂🎹😂
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Hi everyone, late getting to this but here is my week 2 update. Key focus has been balance and tone for the first phase - and trying to get a tempo that works for this piece.
Recorded in an unusually warm Dublin, I think this piece definitely has spring or summer credentials - perhaps set in that time of year during Liszt's Swiss "pilgrimage"! ☀️🏞️
https://youtu.be/ris1dfnjrBA?is=ma_xNLUUPlq-ingW
Derek
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With huge regret, I need to withdraw from the Lisztomaniac challenge this summer. I’ve been diagnosed with cervical osteoarthritis, which has been affecting me more and more over the past five months. I don’t have pain when I play the piano, which is good—but I’m just too tired. The lack of sleep caused by the pain is wearing me down.
So I don’t practice as much as I used to, and I’m therefore not really progressing anymore. I feel I just need to reduce my piano-related goals to a minimum. I’ll still follow your updates so I can stay connected to the piano activities.
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I’ve decided that I’m not going to participate by playing in this challenge (I will listen, watch, cheer on!). Trying to do so put me over my manageable stress level! Since I’m the (volunteer) cantor for our church and we have no choir, I’ve been spending many hours each week preparing music for the weekend. Adding the Liszt to the mix was just too much. Thurmond and I are working on Sancte Caecilia together, though, because learning a vocal piece is much more in my wheelhouse, especially since it’s in Latin. .
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Hi Michelle.. good to know you are a cantor in the local church!. We used to have a great choir conductor a few years ago.. Did you learn latin as well for the singing ? You may like to try Laudate Dominum from WAM with an arrangement by the incredible Vikingur Olafsson.. I have been practising this and find it syngeristic with church as well... I have the score .. if you need one.. It is pretty much a beginner/intermediate level piece.. (if I can get through it .. almost anyone else can easily play it .. lol! )
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we are a small country church! I learned Latin when I was young, and it is my favorite language in which to sing. The trick with singing Mozart in our small church is that liturgical singing is designed to bring people deeper into prayer, and Mozart can sometimes become more of a show-piece about the singer than about leading people to God through music. This is why chant is the preferred mode of singing. I do love this piece, though.
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ah yes! Mozart is largely showy.. but .. the little that he composed for church is absolutely amazing ( he attended St Stephens in Vienna ). A friar told me about it when I was 16 and he had come back from Rome.. by coincidence we were there just last week .. roaming the churches in Rome and Florence.. The piece he had talked to me about some 50 years ago was Laudate Dominium and Exsultate Jubilate and the Ave Verum .. all very solemn pieces good for meditation as well..
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No worries Michelle!
I don't know much about churches and cantors. The only other cantor I know of is JS Bach, so you're in good company 😄.
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Liszt.. your favorite composer and whose music you can actually play was a member of the holy order of the church for most of the latter part of his life.. Earlier he was leading the good life.. :-).. I am sure you know about all this.. Bach was Kapellmeister ..and composed almost all of music with church intent.. :-)
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My favorite composer overall is actually JS Bach. Favorite to play is Rachmaninoff. But yes I sure know about Liszt's "good life" years😆.
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I was reading some music literature a few years ago and got curious about Liszt then dug in and found volumes have been written about him. There is a story of Grieg's composition that he took over to Liszt and he played the entire thing .. and then Grieg said something like "oh but I haven't even played it " and Liszt said something like " watch me make a fool of myself" then proceeded to play it flawlessly to Grieg's great astonishment...! I think this is the gist of the story but I can't trust my memory a whole lot now..
Unfortunately for me I cannot even dream! of playing anything of the complexity of Liszt .. Just happy to listen to others..Just looking at the score is scary enough !! with the 128 note runs all in 32nd notes. lol!
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Bach was Kapellmeister ..and composed almost all of music with church intent.. :-)
That statement is not quite accurate - Bach held several positions and when he was Kapellmeister to Prince Leopold in Cöthen he did not write music for the church because Leopold was Calvinist and music was not really performed in the church. During this time Bach wrote many solo and chamber works (including the first book of the Well Tempered Clavier).
Bach later moved to Leipzig as Cantor of the St. Thomas School where he had many responsibilities that did include supervising the musical activities of several churches but he also taught students at the Collegium Musicum and wrote many secular works (including the Goldberg Variations).
It is true that he dedicated all of his compositions "to the glory of God" and he did write many sacred works (particularly when he was court organist in Weimar and for church related duties in Leipzig) but he did not compose "almost all music for church intent" as you say; an enormous amount of his work was for secular purposes.
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ok thanks :-) .. It sure looked like he wrote mainly for the church and organ in particular but you have a better context. At the moment there is a book here on my desk by Sir John Eliot Gardner ( needs no introduction) titled "Bach Music in the Castle of Heaven" .. I have to get to reading it.. after work.. :-)
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If you like Bach, or just amazing music stories, I strongly suggest adding "Evening in the Palace of Reason" by James Gaines to your list. It is a great read about Bach's visit to see his son at the court of Frederick the Great during which Frederick challenged Bach to improvise a fugue on an 'impossible theme" (written to intentionally resist contrapuntal treatment). The result was The Musical Offering which was pretty much the ultimate clapback. Gaines does a great job of bringing this bit of history to life and making Bach seem even more brilliant than we already think of him =)
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