New Liszt Entire Works volume published

29 January 2016

The Entire Works, volume 7, contains Liszt’s earliest Hungarian-style pieces.

The scientific edition publishes – for the first time – the entire Hungarian songs series of 11 works. The composer started writing them in the wake of his first visit to Pest in 1839. In the early 1850s Liszt partly reused the material in the popular 15 Hungarian Rhapsodies. The Pest Carnival was inspired by Liszt’s second, round-trip in Hungary in 1846; later it was reworked into the No. 9 of Hungarian Rhapsodies. In addition, the volume contains the previously unpublished first variation of the 1st Hungarian Rhapsody as well as two more extensive fragments from the 1840s and numerous album sheets.

The latest volume of the Liszt Entire Works is of particular value in musicological terms for the foreword (in English and German) containing new research findings, numerous manuscript facsimiles and critical apparatus. Parallel with the publication of the hardback volume there is also a practical, paperback version; the content of the paperback version is identical to the Entire Works volume except for the omission of the critical apparatus. One of the two publishers of the new volume is Adrienne Kaczmarczyk, lecturer at the Musicology Department.