Piano Concerto No. 2 (Liszt)

Franz Liszt wrote drafts for his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 2 in A Major, S.125, during his virtuoso period, in 1839 to 1840. He then put away the manuscript for a decade. When he returned to the concerto, he revised and scrutinized it repeatedly. The fourth and final period of revision ended in 1861. Liszt dedicated the work to his student Hans von Bronsart, who gave the first performance, with Liszt conducting, in Weimar on January 7, 1857.

This concerto typically lasts about 20 minutes.

Form and overview

This concerto is one single, long movement, divided into six sections that are connected by transformations of several themes:

• Adagio sostenuto assai
• Allegro agitato assai
• Allegro moderato
• Allegro deciso
• Marziale un poco meno allegro
• Allegro animato

Liszt called this work Concerto symphonique while in manuscript. This title was borrowed from the Concertos symphoniques of Henri Litolff. Liszt liked not only Litolff's title but also the idea for which it stood. This concept was one of thematic metamorphosis — drawing together highly diverse themes from a single melodic source. This was a concept of which Liszt was already familiar from his study of Franz Schubert's Wanderer Fantasie. Beethoven had also used such a device in his Symphony No. 9 (Beethoven), transforming the "Ode to Joy" theme during the final movement. With Liszt, however, thematic transformation would become a compostional device to which he he would turn time and again—in the symphonic poems, the Faust and Dante Symphonies, and the B minor Piano Sonata.

This use of thematic transformation likewise changed Liszt's attitude toward compositional form. Compared to his contemporaries, who still used sonata form more or less conventionally, Liszt departed from the form at times radically. Themes are shuffled into new and unexpected sequences, with their various metamorphoses showcasing kalediscopic contrasts.

Recapitulations became foreshortened. Codas assume developmental proportions. Three- and four-movement structures are rolled into one. Liszt's justification, as he phrased it, was, "New wine demands new bottles."

With his Second Piano Concerto, however, Liszt took the practice of creating a large-scale compositional structure from metamorphosis alone to an extreme level. Its opening lyrical melody becomes the march-theme of the finale. That theme, in turn, morphs into an impassioned theme near the end of the concerto. The theme which begins the scherzo reappears at that sections end disguised as a totally different melody in another key. This last transformation is so complete that it is easy to not recognize the connection. Key, mode, time signature, pace and tonal color have all been transformed. For Liszt to so radically altar the music's notation while remaining true to the essential idea behind it shows a tremendous amount of ingenuity on his part.

Like the First Piano Concerto, the compositional structure unfolds continually as the work progresses. With the First Piano Concerto, this structure assumes a multi-movement format fairly clearly. This does not happen in the Second Piano Concerto. Neither does it conform to a single long movement based on sonata first-movement form in the way that the B minor Piano Sonata does. Some have argued that Liszt may have been aiming for a structural intermediate between these two poles. This, they explain, is why the Second Piano Concerto can seem ambiguous structurally.

What is undeniable is that the Second Piano Concerto is more poetic, less virtuosic for virtuosity's sake than its predecessor. This may be one reason it has never held the same popularity. Another reason may be that it is a much harder work to successfully perform than its predecessor because it demands much more interpretively than simply digitally.

Performance history

Liszt was cautious about performances of the Second Piano Concerto. This stemmed mainly from his desire to protect his students from the undue wrath of crtitcs. For instance, he wrote Johann von Herbeck, then director of the Vienna Philharmonic, "In case [pianist Hans von] Bülow should make his appearance at the Philharmonic concert he will, on my advice, not play my A-major Concerto (nor any other composition of mine) but just simply one of the Bach or Beethoven concertos. My close froemds know perfectly well that it is not my desire to push myself into any concert programme whatever."

This cautiousness was not always a hard-and-fast rule. The then-17-year-old Karl Tausig played the work in Prague on March 11, 1858. Tausig repeated it in Weimar on August 8, 1860 to general acclaim. This was after the incident in that city over Peter Cornelius's The Barber of Bagdad and not long before Liszt would resign as music director there.

Sources

• Walker, Alan, Franz Liszt: Volime Two, The Weimar Years, 1848-1861 (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1989). ISBN 0-394-52540-x. Traces the history of the work and the development of themes through it.
• Steinberg, Michael, The Concerto (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). ISBN: 0-19-510330-0.

External links

• Free scores by Piano Concerto No. 2 at the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP)
• The concerto, live on RAI: YouTube, 1st part, 2nd part, 3rd part