ABSTRACT
For more than a century, most historians maintained that Liszt wrote no orchestral music – or none of significance – before he settled in Weimar after retiring from the “traveling circus life” of a keyboard virtuoso. By 1835, however, Liszt had finished or almost finished three substantial surviving compositions for piano and orchestra and begun at least three others. During the later 1830s and throughout the 1840s he completed, drafted, sketched, or talked about composing a dozen additional pieces for piano and orchestra, voices and orchestra, or orchestra alone, including several works on Hungarian themes. Nevertheless, Liszt published his first orchestral scores only in 1857, and he produced little entirely new orchestral music after 1866. This chapter examines Liszt’s orchestral compositions and adaptations which, in certain stylistic respects, build upon his keyboard fantasies and adaptations. It concentrates on the early piano-orchestral fantasies, the little-known cantatas of the 1840s, the symphonies and symphonic poems, and a few later works, Les morts among them. It also includes observations about program music, the difficulties in dating much of Liszt’s output, the seemingly contradictory character of his semi-sacred, semi-secular ensemble music, and his mature mastery of orchestral scoring.
