Emil von Sauer plays Liszt Réminiscences de Don Juan

[@willgraham8878]

This is truly a terrifying, electrifying, gravity defying performance fitting a direct student of Liszt himself!!! One can only imagine what Liszt himself did with the piece. During his performances people would literally become terrified and fearful of the sounds he was able to "Evoke"!! His performances opened vortex's between the physical and the Astral....

[@vladibaby79]

The tempi of this recording Display a lot of the Qualities of the Piece in the right way. A lot of phrasings have the right flow and Sound Logical. And of course it sounds breathtaking. I don't think that the rolls run too fast, because otherwise some sections would be too slow. Most of the Piece is not too fast, only some sections are really almost inhuman fast, but it seems to be original: the synchronising of the Hands is then not perfect. So, I suppose we hear here the originaly played tempo. If Sauer were slower and then also a bit unsynchronized, this would be quite disappointing and not according to a Pianist of his Level.

[@docc1]

Interesting factoid about Maestro von Sauer. He was born with a congenital malformation, having three hands with eight fingers per hand, which explains this remarkable performance.

[@giuliabiagetti9900]

Great! But in the last time of his life he had really only nine fingers! He was my great grandfather. Giulia biagetti

[@nimrodshefer3649]

@@giuliabiagetti9900 since when he had nine fingers- what year?

[@giuliabiagetti9900]

30 years before his death he had a problem with a tendon and can't use one finger. He kept this as a secret even for the family as long as he could and ridesign every compositions in order to play it as he had 10.

[@nimrodshefer3649]

@@giuliabiagetti9900 thank you very much for thus amazing information!

[@russellthompson9271]

Another interesting factoid. Liszt had 1000 fingers.

[@emilvonsauer2565]

OHH OLD DAYS...

[@AsrielKujo]

@Enescu d

[@Mereaux]

Ok

[@CatLover69420]

Ok

[@itsshrimp91]

How's it feel to be one of liszt's best pupils?

[@emilvonsauer2565]

@@itsshrimp91 BASED

[@pianolainstitute]

There seem to have been a number of poorly informed comments about the player piano amongst these postings. I'll try to set the record straight. Firstly, this recording was made by means of an Aeolian 65/88-note Pianola (a push-up), which was converted to play exclusively Welte-Mignon rolls some time around the 1960s or 1970s, and at any rate before October 1977, when it featured in a Swedish TV programme. The instrument was placed in front of a Steinway concert grand piano for the purposes of the recording. There are some photographs of the push-up on the internet, if you are patient enough to Google for long enough, and someone clearly did a good job, installing the correct size of take-up spool for Red Welte rolls (so that the acceleration would in theory be correct), and using pedal actuators for the piano that were either removed from an original Welte push-up or carefully copied. It is quite wrong to suggest that the roll used for playback might have swollen on account of moisture, and for two very obvious reasons, namely that water-damaged Red Welte rolls (and I have seen many in my time) buckle and become bumpy, so that fistfuls of wrong notes creep in, since the roll no longer makes an airtight seal across the tracker-bar. Any Red Welte roll that had swollen sufficiently to increase the thickness of the roll appreciably (which would be an enormous increase) would be completely unplayable for many other reasons as well. If a Red roll expands at all, it also expands laterally, and that means that both the notes and the expression perforations would no longer correspond with the correct holes in the tracker-bar over which it slides, and the music would be a cacophonous mess, the automatic pedals would not work, and the dynamic coding would fail or become completely haphazard. So any problems are definitely not caused by moisture. But there are many other reasons why perceived faults can occur, and I use the word "perceived" for good reason. Firstly, questions of playback: Welte rolls were not made for concert halls or concert grand pianos. They were made in the main for heavy duty uprights or smallish grands, the latter usually of Steinway "O" size, though certainly not always Steinways, and they were recorded on either a Steinway or, more often in the early days, a Feurich grand, of about Steinway "B" size. There is a limit to the dynamic range that was intended, and Welte (possibly uniquely, or possibly in common with Philipps of Frankfurt, to whom they probably licensed their early recording technology) were able to record dynamic coding automatically, without the need for roll editors. That's not to say that no roll was ever edited, because a young musician in the 1920s, Hans Haass, worked on some rolls, especially in connection with their conversion to the new Welte Green system, and in any case the Welte recording system marked, rather than perforated, its original rolls, so someone had to go through and make perforations by hand where the marks occurred. You can make a Welte louder, by using heavy regulator springs, but then you turn the delicate pianissimos into less subtle mezzo-pianos, and in general you coarsen the dynamic response of the piano, and you very possibly get to the loudest point too early, so that the cataclysmic climaxes lose their fire. There are many Welte instruments set up in this way, usually because there is an element of male pride involved, because present-day owners of fine old instruments want to impress their friends. In this case, I would say that the folk who originally recorded this did the best job they could, but these recordings are relatively recent, and I should think that those who made them were not the same people who created the hybrid Welte push-up in the first place, so they may well not have understood the instrument quite as well as their predecessors. But they made the choice of using a concert grand, and so they clearly wanted the dynamic range of a concert grand, and that is where the trouble starts, particularly because the balance of the bass and treble is thereby upset. I note that someone, either KZbin or Gullivior, has lowered the audio level of the original mp3, and it seems to sound a little less bass heavy. Welte's recording machines (and there is one that has survived, at the Musical Museum at Seewen, near Basel in Switzerland) were built like battleships, with a very strong electric motor to pull the roll through, and a take-up spool of the same size as was used in both their pianos and organs. There won't be any incorrect acceleration on account of the take-up spool size. But in all the pictures of this push-up that I can find, there is no indication of the motor (pneumatic or electric) that was used to pull the roll through. There was a photo taken in 1977, which I once found on the web, which had been sold on Ebay a number of years before, and as well as a suction supply, one could see an electric cable disappearing into the push-up, which tends to suggest an electric motor, though it could also have been for the pedal actuators, if they had been replaced by solenoids to make them faster to respond. Normal Welte roll motors, which are pneumatic, are not efficient, no matter how carefully one rebuilds and regulates them. I have a friend who runs his with a stroboscope on its flywheel (and the mere presence of a flywheel is a good indication that Welte knew that the roll tempo was not always steady), and one can see the tempo fluctuating by small amounts most of the time that the music heads towards forte. Welte also put in a mechanism that provided extra suction for the roll motor when the dynamics got louder, and again this shows up a weakness in this regard. But an electric motor for playback should be fine, and there is unlikely to be any unnecessary acceleration on that account. But the greatest perceived weakness for us human beings is really down to Welte's dynamic recording system , or at least the combination of that system with a Welte roll played back on a piano whose dynamic balance and range are fairly far removed from the acoustic and piano in the original recording location. You have to hand it to Welte, coming up with an automatic dynamic recorder by 1904, using only techniques and materials that would have been readily available in the factory of an electro-pneumatic organ company (and you can disregard any rubbish you read about large baths of mercury and carbon rods on springs). But they did it, "they" being Edwin Welte and Karl Bockisch, the one a young businessman, and the other an engineer and inventor, though one does have to wonder whether there was not, perhaps, some uncredited expert pianist in the background, since the dynamic system fits so very well with the general ways in which pianists play. But, although the system was very clever, it was still 1904, and the playback mechanism, like those to be found on any pneumatic reproducing piano, was split into only two sections, treble and bass, so that only two dynamic levels were possible at any one moment. In addition the Welte system is handicapped by the less than instantaneous response of its fast crescendo mechanisms, which, as their name suggests, were not really designed for instant accents. Welte pianos can work very well with the likes of Chopin Nocturnes, where a gentle melody sings out above a restrained accompaniment, but in a piece like the Don Juan Fantasy (including the moments around 11.16, mentioned a few weeks ago), there is simply too much detail for either the recording or the playback mechanism to deal with. Instead of the important notes twinkling like jewels, they get overwhelmed by the accompaniment, and that has the effect of emphasizing the speed. If the accompaniment in such places were less prominent, one's ears would hear the accents better, and the greater space between the accents would give a less rushed impression. I would say that this recording is just that little bit too loud at the lowest levels, and it therefore gets just that little bit too loud too quickly as the dynamic approaches forte, and that also makes the performance sound uncontrolled, and therefore rushed. But I don't doubt for a moment that Herr von Sauer could play it at this speed. He was not alone in that regard - seek out some of Ignaz Friedman's 78 recordings, for example, such as the Op. 10/7 Chopin Etude which Gullivior and many others have kindly uploaded. In a way speed is not so difficult, because it is simply a question of technique, obtained by dedicated (some might say obsessive!) practice, just like an athlete. The real skill comes in allying the technique to expressivity, or in using it to uplift the spirit of an audience, and not just to dazzle them. Don Juan would be fine at the end of a concert, but I wouldn't want a whole evening of such music! By the way, a piece of piano roll trivia - Emil Sauer was one of the very first pianists, if not THE first, to record a whole selection of piano rolls, which he did at the premises of the Aeolian Company in New York, at 18 West 23rd Street, on Saturday 20th May, 1899. The rolls were never published, as far as I know, but on hearing them on the day in question, Sauer complained that one of them was not being played back fast enough, and so the playback speed was increased to his satisfaction. Enough said!

[@pianolainstitute]

Firstly, to Pisistrato the singular tyrant, who seems to move effortlessly between colloquial Italian and ancient Greek: I'm surprised that your expert linguistic efforts have not managed to produce even one small cazzo of comprehension. Perhaps you need to strain a little harder! For Xiaoran Luo, I don't think I stated or implied that the roll used for this audio recording had been edited by a human being for any reason at all, either tempo or dynamics, but do by all means let me know if my account is unclear. Sauer recorded this roll for the Welte Company in Germany on 25 November 1905, if the roll labels on some of the earlier copies are accurate, so we are dealing with a recording process that is currently 116 years old. During the 1920s, the Company did re-edit some of its recordings, but this was mainly in connection with transferring the recorded performances to a smaller style of music roll, which had slightly different parameters. For example, on the newer style of roll the sustaining and soft pedal mechanisms were actuated by continuous perforations which lasted as long as the duration of the pedal in question. On the older style there was a lock and cancel system which used one slot to start each pedal and one to stop it, so the actuating perforations were therefore potentially much shorter, and these differences had to be edited in to the master rolls by hand. A lot of these 1920s German Welte production masters have survived and are stored in the library at USC in Los Angeles, so the (mostly) pedal editing can clearly be seen. But I did also quote a newspaper story from the New York Sun of January 24th, 1899, which has nothing to do with this Don Juan roll recording, and also nothing to do with the Welte Company. On Saturday May 20th, 1899, Sauer tried out the Aeolian Company's relatively new experimental real-time recording piano and perforating machine, and a report of the occasion was printed four days later in the New York Sun, with a note at the end in small type, "Adv", presumably indicating that the article was advertising material rather than editorial. I have read the entire report again, very carefully, and I have to say that it is not actually stated that Sauer recorded more than one roll: his own "Valse de Concert," which was then placed into a Pianola and played, by some anonymous Pianolist. The writer does note that a number of other pieces followed, including two composed by Sauer, but despite what seems like a deliberate implication, there is actually no specific corroboration that these were also recorded rolls. Sauer asked for the speed of one of these rolls to be increased, with the implication that the maximum speed on the Pianola being used for playback was not high enough. The roll was therefore fitted into another Pianola, with a roll motor that could be set at a higher speed. Since the Aeolian Company was using the report as a form of advertising, it presumably wanted to emphasize that the paper speeds of its rolls could easily be adjusted. Only two rolls recorded by live pianists were sold by Aeolian before 1912, the year in which most other American piano roll companies followed suit, and apart from those two titles, every commercial roll that originated in the USA before 1912 was transcribed directly from the sheet music by trained editors, with the deliberate intention that the Pianolist or player-pianist at home should be able to phrase the music by creating the dynamics with the foot pedals and achieving human rubato by the constant and delicate movement of the tempo control. Whatever the case with Sauer's visit to Aeolian in January 1899, it's quite impossible to check the details, because Sauer is no longer around to be interviewed, and besides, it has nothing to do with the roll used for this audio recording, except to confirm that any variation of paper speed on playback has no effect on the pitch of the music. There are other considerations, in particular that our contemporary and rather slavish obsession with "authentic" tempi was not really shared by the composers, recording producers or listeners of the early 1900s. If the listener at home didn't like the speed (and the acoustics of different rooms can have a significant effect on the human perception of speed), then she or he had only to alter the speed control. No big deal, as far as they were concerned. Welte in Germany were also able to perforate their rolls at one or two different set paper speeds, particularly if the recording was a long one, but that is an enormous subject, and most people are simply here to marvel at Sauer's performance. If you really want to know about piano roll recording in detail, read my articles in the Pianola Journal, all the issues of which are free to download at www.pianola.org. That is certainly enough for now - I'll wait until the cazzo hits Peisistratos' variable-speed ventilatore!

[@Bohh574]

@@pianolainstitute well well well well. Let's start with presentations: I'm Italian, I'm studying Greek and I'm very fascinated by the figure of Pisistrato. My comment wasn't ment to say anything, and your first comment was very clear. I didn't even think that you would have understood my comment. Do you know Italian or it was Google translate? I think you know Italian, you seem to be a cultured man. Do you also know ancient Greek? Any way sorry if I my comment wasn't so meaningful. Have a nice day and thanks anyway for the new explanation.

[@Bohh574]

Ah and please don't say tyrant as a bad word. You certainly knows that τυραννοι as Pisistrato made lots of improvement in the chaotic world of the poleis. Also the word tyrant as changed is meaning in the centuries, passing by a special magistrate in ancient Greek and Rome (in Rome they used the word dictator but it is basically the same, except that it was a regular magistrate) at a cruel and evil man who destroys the state in the contemporary age.

[@pianolainstitute]

@@Bohh574 Dear Pisistrato - the player piano frequently gets ridiculed, and I've spent more years than you have been alive (I'm guessing!), trying to set the record straight. Heaven knows, I don't do it for myself, I do it for the instrument in general, which is potentially wonderful in nearly all its forms. Unfortunately the world remembers its history as a series of fairy tales, and the musical world is no exception. The further we get from historical events and inventions, the coarser is our understanding, and just at the moment we have come to a point in the world of the player piano where the former expertise of individual collectors is passing to institutional musicologists. Unfortunately, most of the collectors were more interested in polishing their piano cases or lubricating their gear wheels, while the new university and college departments, apart from seeming not to value the emotional nature of historic piano performances (as opposed to the statistical analysis of rubato in terms of percentages), show no signs of wanting to investigate mechanisms in a practical way - we would say "getting their hands dirty" in colloquial English. I have roughly 15,000 music rolls, and I despair over what I should do with them. If they go to a museum, any museum, they will die, because only one or two will be used, every half-hour, and the rest will lie in their boxes until they are roasted by global warming. Many decades ago I studied French and German at school, plus Latin, and before I wrote my reply of an hour ago, I looked at your channel and thereby educated myself with regard to Peisistratos, resorting to Google Translate for the Cyrillic Greek. Thank you for providing the motive for that journey! And thank you also for educating me with regard to tyranny - I didn't really intend to use the word "tyrant" as a derogatory term: it was simply that Wikipedia described him as such. He is also described as a man of the people, and I have no problem with that either, except insofar as many of the world's current problems seem to have been exacerbated by "men of the people," - Brazil, UK, Hungary, Russia, USA and so on. The clever people in the world have designed societies to suit themselves, especially with regard to money. Men of the people use the resultant frustration of the masses to massage their own egos and to enrich themselves, but the solutions to global warming, if indeed there are any at all, are complex in the extreme, and are not to be found in governments run by men of the people. But global warming will not affaect me personally, not much at any rate, because I shall die before it really takes hold. But I am sad for my friend, the player piano, for my lover, the player piano, perhaps, because I have known and loved it for over fifty years, and I think it will soon die, at least as a sensitive musical instrument. I tried not to be excessively rude in reply to you, but rather to draw you out, and I'm pleased that you have responded - elegantly, I would say. If I were not allergic to alcohol in all its forms, we ought to drink a good glass of Italian wine together - Vino Nobile di Montepulciano, perhaps, since I have a friend who is an Ambasciatore. At any rate, my wife can drink it on my behalf. While you are drinking yours, look at the video of Brigg Fair on our channel - it's an emotional video which to a degree expresses my love and gentle sadness with regard to the instrument. And, by the way, back in 1986 I gave a concert at La Fenice in Venice, and I just about managed to introduce it in Italian. It is the lingua franca of music, after all. The most memorable part of the Venetian exercise was travelling with my Pianola along the Grand Canal, with the Venetian piano movers steering their boat rather like the English think the Italians drive their cars. I really thought the Pianola would end up underwater, but I held on to it with all my strength! Best wishes, Rex Lawson

[@Bohh574]

@@pianolainstitute pleased to have "met" you! Best wishes to you too!

[@duartevader2709]

This is abusrdly good

[@cziffrathegreat666]

I seriously believe he could play the liszt paganini etude 4 1838 at the right (fast) tempo

[@MathieuPrevot]

No he plays it slow kzbin.info/www/bejne/nZDMl6imjqediNE but Feux follets and Mazeppa are a much bigger challenge physically and mentally and musically.

[@Mannometer]

I mean, how is that even possible 🔥

[@marcychristoff219]

What a thrill to hear this! 👏🎹

[@delamoraraulpiano]

Great performance, bravo Maestro.

[@pianopera]

Ladies, take care: a Don Juan on steroids...

[@vladibaby79]

+pianopera Oh yes!!!

[@Mereaux]

Ok

[@CarmenReyes-em9np]

No interesa con jaquer.

[@CarmenReyes-em9np]

🇮🇷🎹🏆🥇.

[@thewizardii1638]

hard for us these days to comprehend maybe i know..

[@metteholm4833]

A very sophisticated roll quality.

[@Mannometer]

WOW WOW WOW 😮 🔥🔥🔥

[@rapsodie1211]

Je ne sais pas s'il y a effectivement un problème avec le système de reproduction mais en tout cas ça pourrait très bien se jouer comme on l'entend, ça serait conforme à la partition, on lit ça et là que Liszt n''aimait pas qu'on joue trop vite et que la musicalité et la générosité était plus importantes pour lui mais en même temps il n'avait pas acquis sa réputation de pianiste diabolique seulement en ayant une belle sonorité et du sentiment.

[@antiiczzz5671]

Le problème c'est justement que il jouait terriblement vite et avec une expression absolument hors norme il a écrit de la musique purement quasi impossible a bien jouer pour un pianiste (même de haut niveau) le problème étant que la plupart des pianistes modernes on l'un mais pas l'autre soit ils jouent les pièces avec beaucoup de vitesse mais peu d'expression soit l'inverse en fait il suffit juste d'écouter la manière que Von Sauer a de jouer le libestraume pour se rendre compte a quel point on est a l'opposé de ce qui se fait de nos jours Liszt était l'équivalent de Paganini au violon, un violoniste ayant selon la légende vendu son âme au diable pour obtenir sa virtuosité et oui Liszt était au moins équivalent a ce niveau.

[@pianista-mediocre]

​@@antiiczzz5671Currently, the people I see playing fast and with expression are Argerich, Hamelin, Katsaris and other pianists from an older generation

[@antiiczzz5671]

@@pianista-mediocre Oh i would love to hear them i will look if they put any recordings about this piece

[@pianista-mediocre]

​@@antiiczzz5671 Hamelin is the only one of those who recorded Liszt's Reminiscences. Katsaris recorded all of Beethoven's symphonies. I recommend listening to the third and ninth, especially

[@alanleoneldavid1787]

Take that lang lang

[@ValzainLumivix]

Lolo

[@Mereaux]

xd

[@oneginee]

This is variations from Liszt on La Ci darem La Mano which is a duet sung by Don Juan and Zerlina in the opera Don Juan by Mozart.

[@pookz3067]

To add to that, also uses the overture (itself made of themes appearing throughout the opera so that’s a bit of cheating on me part), commentatore scene, and the Don Giovanni aria grom the finale of act I

[@RollaArtis]

Presumably this is a recording of Welte roll, but clearly there's something wrong here. I would guess it's probably caused by warped paper in the roll causing an accumulative accelerando. Seems that many who make such recordings have no idea that what they are hearing is just perverse.

[@haotianyu6368]

I'm curious: do such errors occur during the recording (so to speak), or is it a problem unique to a certain copy?

[@RollaArtis]

Haotian Yu The original master roll would have been OK, they would have produced many copies from it. But if these become damp or wet the paper warps, and no longer winds up tightly on the spool. The paper effectively is now much thicker than originally, and in practise will wind on to the take up spool of ever increasing diameter. So due to this difference in thickness, the 'performance' will start at the correct tempo but gradually become way too fast as the diameter increases.

[@rainchen7846]

@@RollaArtis Oh that's what it is! I've always been wondering cause this recording sounds so not human, thanks for clearing that up.

[@RollaArtis]

@@rainchen7846 Try the playback speed at 0.75. Or better still try a modern recording.

[@Thomas_Ruiz]

Yes it's clearly accelerated

[@RobinPratt]

That photo is from the Hupfeld studio.

[@BaroneVitellioScarpia1]

10:07

[@operaclassicalmusiclover3437]

This is insane...

[@adpynacker1]

I have been listening to historical piano recordings regularly for nearly 50 years... I have had a dubbing of this piano roll performance on a Melodya LP for over 30 years. I have never considered it to be an accurate account of Sauer's performance - the most virtuosic episodes to my ear are too fast to be credible. Contemporary accounts of Sauer's playing do not especially comment that he played faster than other virtuosos of the time.

[@OwlyEagles]

I suppose it depends on the piece he plays. I've read that his colleagues who also learned from Liszt listed Emil Von Sauer as the closest candidate to Liszts style of playing. In what manner they spoke of I can't remember. I wouldn't doubt he couldn't play a passage fast if he wanted to.

[@pookz3067]

@@OwlyEaglesbut people only said his style was similar. No one ever comments that these players were just so much faster than anyone else alive, and it’s not credible that they were when recordings of people like rachmaninof, Hofmann, and Lhevinne exist. You’d think there’d be more written about it if Sauer’s speeds could leave the above 3 in the dust. Saying that someone played like Liszt to a pianist would typically never refer to technical ability.

[@thewizardii1638]

this and busonis roll people say the rolls are too fast busonis is also fast as this is ..why would both be too fast.. too much coincidence..i think maybe this and busonis roll are correct...but the modern ear is niot used to great playing like this off a pian-ist that can actually play..therfore i think the speed is maybe correct....twoof the greatest ian-ist there is..

[@KenWangpiano]

Why would that be too much of a coincidence? Similar technologies are likely to encounter similar problems

[@GUILLOM]

WOW

[@GUILLOM]

@Schuyler Bacn guiyé

[@PianothShaveck]

I slowed the recording by 15% and it sounds definitely much more human and reasonable, while still sounding very fast in all the extreme parts. I uploaded the slightly slowed audio on my channel, I think it's worth a listen.

[@epicaunleashed8764]

Link please?

[@thenotsookayguy]

​@@epicaunleashed8764kzbin.info/www/bejne/o4KYmaiboZx4i7csi=vyRMaTA-S4azjFOT

[@thenotsogoodpianist4706]

wth , is that what a pupil can do , imagine what the teacher could hv done

[@CarmenReyes-em9np]

Que bien interprta a Liszt. N

[@Mozart0230]

4:14 6:45 9:10 10:45

[@lunchmind]

Emil von Sauer was certainly a brilliant pianist/ musician but astute comments here not withstanding, the speed displayed here seems humanly impossible.

[@oneginee]

That's Liszt level of playing for you.

[@vnwa7390]

@@oneginee One can only try to begin and imagine how even greater virtuosi such as Thalberg, Liszt himself, C. Tausig and the Rubinstein brothers would have played this colossally difficult work.

[@dobadobado1994]

The roll is going to fast?

[@oneginee]

No, he is just that good.

[@prammar1951]

@@oneginee No, piano rolls are not perfect... The tempo is inhuman. Simply with time, piano rolls start to sound like pianists on steroids.

[@micoveliki8729]

@@prammar1951 all of you made the same bs comments on the busoni video to much of coincidence. There was no problem witht the roll he was just thst good

[@TheRealLoudannIsHere]

​@@micoveliki8729No need to be that rude.

[@micoveliki8729]

@@TheRealLoudannIsHere a basic explanation is being rude snowflake?

[@richardwhitehouse8762]

Really interesting but to me this does not sound like the same pianist who recorded the Liebestraum No3, which had nothing of empty showmanship about it. This simply sounds perfunctory and fast.

[@philipstevenson5166]

What an awful piece. Mozart's tunes are great, but Liszt just added a load of scales. Meant to be an end of show crowd pleaser I guess. No doubt he would have had dry ice, flashing lights and trapeze artists too.

[@acsaha8304]

I respectfully accept your remarks but it is still a great and accurate rendition nonetheless, no? Though perhaps the cadenze/cadenzas are a bit exagerated or excessive (maybe it is there to test the capabilities of the pianist), in my honest and humble opinion, the whole piece is an amazing composition and would be incomplete without those passages. I listen to a plethora of classical music from several composers such as Mozart, Liszt, Beethoven, Alkan, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, etc., and the difference that I have observed between the other's style and Liszt's style is that he adds an encore-like passage on the rising parts and/or climax of his compositions [e.g. parts from the "Douze Grandes Études (S.137)"] which I quite like, as for me, it adds to the mood of the piece. However with all of that, I encourage everyone to listen to their preferred composition that they like. :) P.S. I think Liszt's transcription - Réminiscences de Norma (S.394), was also a great rendition of the opera by Bellini. Edit: Grammar and Spelling Errors