Transcendental Etudes

They are the fruit of protracted efforts: Already in his youth Liszt wrote down first ideas for this cycle of etudes. A reworking and further development took place in 1837, but Liszt was not able to present the definitive version until 1851. As difficult as this entire process of creation was, these etudes are also difficult to play: a sometimes almost impregnable eight-thousander of the piano literature. And they reach miles beyond the template-like nature of typical piano etudes. Some are composed as rather abstract mood paintings, others have programmatic character. Here a performer must not only be a technically virtuoso keyboard acrobat, but here it is equally important to transform pure piano mechanics into musical poetry. This is exactly what is meant by “exécution transcendante”. The twelve etudes in total, some of them with a respectable length of seven, eight and more minutes playing time, occupy a central place not only in Liszt’s œuvre, but also in the so history and development of European piano music.