There are very few songs that have lyrics I approve of, but the idea that if someone loves you, you feel it and never need to hear it, really strikes me …
I was going through my first posts in this thread and realized that you might want to know the stories of songs 3,4,5
3 and 4 are written by Scarlatti, who many music critics have opined “who doesn’t like Scarlatti ?”
These recordings are made on the legendary seina pianoforte … It took 4 generations of the same family to make this piano … Liszt said it sounded divine when he played it, Charles Rosen is a legendary pianist!
The paganini étude is of a series of 6 pieces that liszt transcribed for piano - paganini is the original person of whom stories that someone sold their soul to the devil to play music originated… He was a violinist.
He actually met Beethoven as a child (Beethoven notoriously hated child prodigies). But Beethoven (who was deaf at the time) kissed liszt on the forehead after he was done playing!
The tragic story of liszt, amongst other things, like the pope telling him he couldn’t marry, was that he devoted all his energy to preserving old music from symphonies to piano … And not even a decade after he died, recorded sound was invented, which made his passion to spread this music to the people, irrelevant!
He’s now known as the best transcriber who ever lived, but his partner always used to nag him that he was wasting his time transcribing other composers and not writing more of his own music .
I basically don’t post piano unless it is the best performance… And they really don’t put that on YouTube … So I don’t post much… I’m actually a composer myself and basically have PhD knowledge of this stuff !
I keep forgetting to say stuff… Liszts transcription of this is basically, the first real jazz song in history … Though it also has classical elements !
It opens with the strike of midnight, then the dead coming out of their graves make most the song… At the end , is a roosters crow as the sun rises, and then the dead return to their graves… Thus the end if the song …
Saint sans, was actually considered the best music prodigy of all time, but his general output was un impressive … This is a liszt transcription of a saint sans orchestral …
So beethoven was actually paid by a prince to transcribe this song for piano! It’s a symphony (duh)
Anyways … His notes still survive, and they suck !!
It took the best transcriber in history to pull this feat off… Liszt!
There are two versions that liszt wrote when he tackled all 9 beethoven symphonies… The regular, and the Ossai versions… The Ossai versions assume a 12 stretch and are generally harder to play as well, the regular versions are made for women who had smaller hands… Liszt was very methodical about bringing beethovens symphonies to everyone !
I wanted to be clearer on this song… People say that ska, jazz and scat come from the blacks … This song was made before most blacks even knew what a piano was… And liszt certainly wasn’t influenced by them!
This is a HUGE song in music history… Not many people know that!!