Piano Concerto No.1 in E flat major

It took Liszt twenty-six years to complete his First Piano Concerto. The earliest sketches are actually dated 1830 but the work wasn’t ready to be introduced to the public until 1855, when Liszt himself gave the first performance with no less a musician than Hector Berlioz conducting. Even then he found fault with it and revised the score again a year later. One of the problems was that in the 1830s he was leading the life of a travelling virtuoso, which didn’t leave him much time for writing large-scale works like concertos. Another was his limited knowledge of the orchestra, which he didn’t really get to understand until after he took up his post as Kapellmeister to the Court of Weimar in 1842. But the major problem was that unlike every composer before him - including such admired figures as Beethoven and Chopin - he was unhappy with the standard concerto form in three distinct movements.

Liszt’s ambition was to compose a piano concerto with its movements linked not only by the absence of a break between them but also by the presence of themes which recur, in one form or another, throughout the work. With some help from Schubert’s “Wanderer” Fantasia, which he arranged for piano and orchestra in 1851, he eventually worked out the solution. He applied it first to the Piano Concerto in E flat major and then to the similarly long-planned Piano Concerto in A major which he completed a year later. The main theme of the earlier work is the gruff statement with which it begins on unison strings, before the piano enters to open out its intervals in a sensational series of double octaves. Although there is also a strongly lyrical element here, which the piano is happy to share with a like-minded clarinet, the point of the opening Allegro maestoso is to familiarize the ear with the main theme in a variety of shapes and sizes.

The Quasi adagio, which follows after a short pause, opens with a new melody - or nearly new, since it is distantly related to the main theme of the Allegro maestoso - which is introduced by the strings and poetically developed by the piano. Although a dramatic episode intervenes, with the piano pronouncing an emphatic recitative in octaves over tremolando strings, the tranquil atmosphere is restored in preparation for an inspired melodic contribution from the flute and other woodwind. This material is not developed, however, because the tempo changes abruptly to Allegretto vivace for a magically scored scherzo featuring (an innovation in its day) a prominent role for triangle. The scherzo is also cut short, in this case by a piano cadenza that leads into a recall of the opening Allegro maestoso with the undeveloped woodwind melody from the Quasi adagio ingeniously incorporated in it.

Theoretically, the work could end at this point but this is reckoning without Liszt’s inexhaustible genius for transforming his themes and his boundless energy in adapting them for virtuoso piano treatment. The concluding Allegro marziale animato recycles every significant theme heard so far, beginning with the opening melody of the Quasi adagio transformed into a brisk march tune. The dramatic recitative and the woodwind melody from the same movement are there too, as are the scherzo material with its triangle colours and, finally, the gruff opening main theme of the work now driven by the unrelenting soloist through a thundering Presto coda.