Csárdás obstiné (1884)

Hungarian Rhapsody No.11 in A minor (c.1848)

(Lento a capriccio – andante sostenuto – vivace assai – prestissimo)

Liszt celebrated many nationalities in music but Hungarian more than any other. Since he was born in Hungary and was the most famous Hungarian of his day, that would seem only natural. He was not, however, a Hungarian composer in the same sense as Bartók and even Dohnányi were. He did not speak Hungarian and, after he had moved to Vienna at the age of ten, he never made his home in Hungary – although from 1875 he did have the use of an apartment in Budapest to facilitate his work as president of the newly founded National Hungarian Royal Academy of Music (later the the Liszt Academy of Music) which he visited on a yearly basis.

Liszt had first returned to Hungary in 1839 when he was greeted as a national hero by a country struggling for independence from Austria. It was round this time that he started taking a serious interest in Hungarian music or, rather, Hungarian gyspy music – he actually visited a gypsy encampment to experience the authentic sound – and wrote the Hungarian National Melodies that were later to be incorporated in the first 15 Hungarian Rhapsodies. Most of the rest of his music of this kind, including the last four Hungarian Rhapsodies and three examples of the csárdás, was written during the period of his attachment to the Academy in Budapest. Strangely enough none of the three csárdás pieces, all written between 1881 and 1884, has the slow introduction traditionally associated with the form. In the Csárdás obstiné, for example, Liszt clearly cannot wait to release the dynamic little tune which, giving way only to an assertive fanfare motif, powers its way so obstinately and yet so entertainingly from one end of the dance to the other.

One of the most colourful works of its kind, the Hungarian Rhapsody No.11 is a brilliant demonstration of Liszt’s enthusiasm for the gypsy band. While it is entirely idiomatic piano music, the opening Lento a capriccio in A minor is also an extended and poetic evocation of a cimbalom cadenza, the Andante sostenuto in A major a memory of an expressive gypsy violin solo starting in double-stopped thirds and sixths, the Vivace in F sharp minor a memory of an agile dance featuring a solo clarinet and leading into a Prestissimo coda in F sharp major for the whole ensemble.