Classical Music | Piano Music

Recorded on 09/28/2016, uploaded on 05/04/2017

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Sarabande und Chaconne über Themen aus demSingspiel Almira, S. 181         Franz Liszt, after Handel's first opera, Almira

During the course of his life, Franz Liszt always felt the need to present unknown music to his public, like his unabridged transcriptions of the songs of Schubert, so passé in Paris, or Beethoven’s symphonies – equally unfashionable in the French capital. And then there are his Wagner transcriptions. In a time when Wagner was still vilified, Liszt stepped in to take his musical propaganda for Wagner’s musical dramas, from Tannhäuser to Parsifal, to a higher level.

Handel, too, was a composer who had fallen out of favor in the 19th century. But he was featured strongly in the ‘historic concerts’ Liszt put on in Rome. He wrote Sarabande und Chaconne aus Händel’s Almira for his English student Walter Bache. The choice of Handel was in this case rather clever, being that in London, the city where Bache was to perform, Handel was revered (being that the composer had lived and worked in the British capital for 35 years). But Liszt’s choice of Almira was anything but pandering to the English; the opera, by a twenty-one-year-old Handel, had not even premièred in England. Sarabande und Chaconne strays so far from its source that it is often not seen as a transcription at all but an original, independent Liszt composition, which is among Liszt’s last works  – not at all from his virtuoso days, but among his later more futuristic compositions like La lugubre gondola and Nuages gris. It is also the only work from his final twelve years in which he turns to the Baroque.    Notes by Rob Hilberink

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.