Romantic Piano Favourites, Vol. 7
The seventh in the Naxos series of Popular Piano Pieces
includes music ranging from Mozart to Elgar, much of it from the romantic heyday of the
instrument in the nineteenth century. The well known Pizzicato by the French composer
Delibes was arranged for piano by the composer himself. Originally it formed part of the
ballet Sylvia or The Nymph of Diana, an improbable enough pastoral story, the production
of which in St. Petersburg in 1901 caused the resignation of the young Dyagilev, with
profound effects on the course of ballet in Western Europe.
The Cradle Song
of Brahms is all too well known and was written for the birth of a child to one of the
members of the Hamburg Ladies Choir that he conducted as a young man, before his removal
from his native city to Vienna. Felix Mendelssohn's Cradle
Song, one of the 49 Songs Without Words that proved so popular, were largely
intended by the composer to remain without words and without titles, since he felt that
music spoke clearly and without verbal ambiguity.
Franz Liszt, one of the greatest pianists of his time, retired
from the concert platform in early middle age, devoting himself to composition and to the
encouragement of new music. His four Valses oubliées,
of which the first is included here, belong to his old age and were written in 1881. His
transcription of Schubert's Shakespeare setting, “Hark, hark, the lark”, taken
from the play Cymbeline, belongs to an
earlier period of his life and was published in 1838 in a volume of twelve such
arrangements.
The French composer Gabriel Fauré, a pupil and friend of
Saint-Saëns, epitomizes the spirit of France at the end of the nineteenth century, a time
when a strong element of nostalgia for some unattainable past prevailed, as in the
Berceuse for violin and piano, written in 1878-9, and subsequently orchestrated by the
composer. The piece is in the tradition of Fryderyk Chopin, Polish by birth and sentiment,
but resident in Paris for the greater part of his career. Among other forms, he developed
that of the Nocturne, a poetic creation for the piano in which he was able to employ all
those delicate nuances of which he was a master. The Nocturne
in F minor was written in 1843.
Enrique Granados died at the height of his powers, drowned in
1916 when the ship he was in was torpedoed, as he returned to Spain via Liverpool, after
giving piano recitals in the United States of America. His Spanish Dances were written between 1892 and 1900,
pieces that are quintessentially Spanish in character. The exiled Russian Sergey
Rakhmaninov was also to find a warm welcome in the United States, when circumstances
compelled him to make a living as a performer rather than as a composer. The song “Margaritki”
(Daisies), transcribed by Peter Nagy for piano, belongs to the composer's last group of
such compositions, written in 1916, the year before the Communist Revolution.
The second half of the nineteenth century saw a romantic growth
of nationalism, expressed both politically and culturally. Brahms, a native of Hamburg,
nevertheless found inspiration in the supposed native music of Hungary, which he may first
have heard from the violinist Reményi, his companion on his first concert tour in 1853.
His Hungarian Dances, to which he added
over a period of twenty years, found a ready market.
Mozart settled in Vienna, in independence of father and patron,
in 1781 and initially enjoyed considerable success both as a composer and as a performer,
complementary activities. The Fantasia in C minor was written in 1783 and dedicated to his
pupil Frau von Trattner with an earlier sonata in the same key. Franz Schubert was born in
Vienna in 1797, six years after Mozart's death. He was never to enjoy or suffer the
constraints or benefits of patronage, but spent his short life largely in the company of
friends who admired his many songs and were delighted by the piano pieces he played,
including the wrongly spelt Momens musicals, published in 1828, the year of his death.
Edward Elgar's Salut d'amour
was written in response to a poem from the middle-aged spinster who was to become his
wife, and was followed at once by his proposal of marriage. The piece, originally Liebesgruss (Love's Greeting), sold very much better
under the publishers' new title of Salut d'amour, a source of immense profit to them, and
very little for the composer. Grieg's Melancholie,
the fifth piece in the fourth of the ten albums of Lyric
Pieces
that he was to write, date from much the same period as Elgar's work and
was published in 1888.
