Mozart-Liszt "Confutatis" and "Lacrimosa" from the Requiem

[@nsk5282]

As usual, very through analysis and beautiful performance - sensitive, expressive yet powerful... in one word - flawless! Thank you, Cole, for playing this heavenly music!

[@eddyruijter8159]

Thanks so much for this explanation and performance! I found the Liszt transcription of Lacrimosa on the internet (did not know that it existed), started playing it, found other transcriptions and the difference gis-a versus a-ais sighs. I searched the internet for information, found your video and it is excellent, exactly what I was looking for. Thanks! A liberty I take, and I can recommend (hmm, amateur pianist like me....) is not to break the chords in the left hand, e.g. bar 5, the c-g-c-e chord, and instead play c-g-e (or c-e-g-e), possible without break. In my opinion breaking the chord breaks the strong rhythmic character, too much a pianistic solution. playing c-g-e is possible, the c is already doubled in the right hand, and it maintains the compelling rhythm of the piece.

[@TheIndependentPianist]

That’s a great idea! I might use that next time I play the piece-thank you.

[@adrianthx_]

It sounds great, after all you played the confutatis movement which is my favorite, thanks

[@TheIndependentPianist]

Awesome, glad you enjoyed it!

[@neilkilleen3911]

Intriguing - didn’t know those existed ; I’ve just sung in the Requiem 🎉

[@grahamtwist]

It is not so easy for me to comment on this upload as I have not previously heard any transcriptions of Mozart's magnificent D Minor Requiem, so I am solely used to hearing orchestral versions with solo vocalists and SATB choir. I gather that Liszt's piano solo (c.1865) departs the most from other transcriptions in terms of fidelity and character of the Requiem due to its inclusion of composition devices that showcase pianistic technique. It is such powerful music that I can understand why Liszt would want to explore how he could capture the emotion in the music with piano alone and so I do not feel it is fair to judge what he created in a straight comparison with the original. As you remark, Cole, this transcription maybe reveals more about Liszt than it does about Mozart. With regard to your performance . . . well, I think it's awesome. Sometimes less can be more . . . but with this transcription, the music is different in its impact and that is no reflection on your playing. It is just different to what I am used to. I looked for a 'neater' literal translation of the original Latin text and offer the following by way of a thank you for this upload (!): "Confutatis" Confutatis maledictis When the accursèd have been condemned Flammis acribus addictis And doomed to the searing flames, Voca me cum benedictis Summon me with the saved. Oro supplex et acclinis Suppliant and prostrate, I entreat you, Cor contritum quasi cinis My heart as spent as ashes, Gere curam mei finis Have care for my fate. "Lacrimosa" Lacrimosa dies illa Mournful that day Qua resurget ex favilla When from the ashes shall rise Judicandus homo reus A guilty man to be judged. Huic ergo parce, Deus Lord, have mercy on him. Pie Jesu Domine Gentle Lord Jesus Dona eis requiem Grant them eternal rest. Amen

[@TheIndependentPianist]

Thanks Graham! It was a very interesting experience for me also to look at these transcriptions. Personally I feel that Liszt is truest to the spirit and sound of the original, even though he departs a bit from the exact notes. Thank you also for the translation! Latin is quite fascinating, and I am interested about how it is constructed-I just didn't have time to really do justice to a translation of my own for this video.

[@divinodayacap3313]

I don't understand why making G#-A makes that sighing ostinato higher than the melody/chorale part, when mozart's A-Bb is even higher than Liszt's G#-A.

[@TheIndependentPianist]

Ah yes, thanks for this question. It is because in the original, Mozart jumps downwards to D-C# after the A-Bb, then returns to C-Bb. Liszt changes the outline slightly so that there is no jump downwards to interfere with the melody in the RH. To do that he starts a little lower so he has room and keeps everything in the same register.

[@ev1lazy]

1% Confutatis 99% Bro's jaw

[@xavier00001]

Facts

[@1389Chopin]

Great performance. @11:45 must be nice to have big hands and skinny fingers. My 'beefy' (as my sig other calls them) hands cannot reach..the stretch between 2/3 or 4 i cannot do

[@einberteinbert]

🥰

[@Gatapotata]

Wagner was Liszt's son in law, wasn't he?

[@user-fu7zf4ck9z]

Yes, he was his second son in law. Hans von Bülow, who was basically his right hand for a good portion of his life, was the first son in law of Liszt

[@DanielFahimi]

lol, Mozart marked the Confutatis Andante. Modern performances of that particular movement are way too fast. They try to make it sound agitated, when it's clear Mozart wanted a more a solemn direction. Liszt understood this, and thus it makes sense for Liszt to arrange to Confutatis that way. Liszt was a narcissistic jackass like Gould. He respected the composers, and they're intentions, and played/arranged their pieces accordingly. Maybe this is a but rude, or harsh. If it is, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be mean. I just wanted to point something out.

[@TheIndependentPianist]

Hey thanks for commenting! I must confess I'm confused why this arrangement makes Liszt a narcissistic jackass? Your own argument seems to be that he was bringing to life Mozart's intentions, so surely that should make him the opposite of a narcissist... I guess maybe because he didn't care what people thought of him? I respect him for that also! I'm not sure I'm convinced that Mozart intended this to be taken at the slower tempo. I talked about this a little bit in my video on the A minor Rondo, but there is plenty of source material to suggest that composers in the 18th century considered Andante to be much more flowing tempo than it became in the 19th century. It wasn't really a "slow" tempo per se, but rather the mean between slow and fast. "Andare" is literally "to go" in Italian. Andiamo=let's go etc. But it turned into a genuinely slow tempo during the 19th century, and undoubtedly that's how Liszt interpreted it based on this arrangement. And it can certainly work that way! We don't always have to be slaves to the composer's original vision, if we find another way that is convincing. Anyway, doesn't sound rude or harsh... except maybe to Liszt, and he's dead anyway! But I'm guessing you actually mean "narcissistic jackass" in a good way!

[@DanielFahimi]

@@TheIndependentPianist I meant Liszt WASN'T a narcissist. Gould was though. I think the tempo most people play it, sounds like Allegro Vivace, or Allegro Agitato, or something like that. Andante blurs the line between slow and fast. It's somewhere in the middle. I think, if you play the way Liszt wrote it, I think it would make sense. You can play it faster if you want. You can play it as fast as how the orchestras perform the original version. The octaves aren't even that fast. If playing the octaves in Liszt's B Minor Sonata is possible, this certainly is too. I disagree with the notion that we aren't the composers slaves. If it didn't matter, the composer wouldn't write in the first place. For example, everyone ignores the choppy phrasing in the downward figure in the main theme of the A Minor Rondo. The choppy phrasing is much more expressive than how most people play it. My headcanon is that Mozart wrote that to emulate the sounds of crying. It's also much more interesting. Sometimes, composers don't write something because it's so obvious. I don't think anything other than that works well. Try something different, it sounds mechanical, clunky, and even bizarre. It's only rational and logical thing to do. This is exactly why I think good Mozart interpreters are virtually non-existent. The only one that comes to mind is Robert Levin. Robert Levin is the only good one, and unfortunately, he didn't complete his cycle of recordings Mozart's Piano Concerti and Piano Sonatas. However, for his orchestral music, there are several great interpreters, including Gardiner, Hogwood, and etc.

[@TheIndependentPianist]

@@DanielFahimi But.... Gardiner and Hogwood interpret the Confutatis quite on the faster side of things! At any rate the tempo that they take might feel quite rapid because of the 32nd notes, but if you are feeling the quarter note beat, then even the fastest renditions are in a fairly leisurely tempo. Give the octaves a try and see if you can get the 32nds any faster, I'd be curious! I find that the fastest speed that the octave arpeggios can be played at is pretty much the same as the various octave arpeggios in the Liszt sonata-that's basically how fast I'm playing them. It might not seem that way, because in this case they don't stand out like they do in the sonata-but the speed is pretty much the same. Of course what a composer writes matters. Every detail must be considered. But at the same time, the composer's notation is not actually the music-it is only a guide to creating the musical experience. Time and time again we can hear on records that composers who were great performers did not perform their music exactly as they wrote it. And that's as it should be-one simply cannot notate every detail that one wants, and more importantly, the music will be different with every performer who plays it, and every performer will play the same piece differently as they grow and change. That is really what makes the whole experience alive and meaningful. If all we had to do was exactly realize the composer's notation, computers could do the job as well as a human, but we both know that it doesn't work that way. It is the unpredictability, the inconsistencies, the imperfections of human performers that really make a piece of music come to life. At least that's my take on it!

[@DanielFahimi]

@@TheIndependentPianist Tempo indications back then weren't really 'tempo indications'. They more or less described the character of the piece.

[@TheIndependentPianist]

@@DanielFahimi Well I guess I would agree with that in a very broad sense, but even in the Confutatis movement there are two widely diverging characters that Mozart presents under the heading "Andante." He doesn't use a new tempo, or character indication to introduce the 2nd idea, instead he writes different note values to change the character. That seems to indicate to me that he was using Andante as a way to indicate a well understood basic tempo range, with the quarter note as the beat. If you look at treatises at the time (Leopold Mozart, or Türk for example) they do lay the tempi out in a kind of table with gradations from slowest (largo) to fastest (prestissimo), and say that the choice of tempo was determined by considering the tempo indication along with the meter (4/4, cut time etc.). It seems to me like it was the next few generations that really started adding detailed character indications with their tempi-famously, of course was Beethoven in that regard. Sorry to dispute so much-it's not a big deal! I just find this stuff to be interesting.

[@bach_solo]

To begin with, you were playing it faster than it was recorded by many (von Karajan, for example), and faster than it should have been played. No need to explain the slower tempi so much at the very beginning, in particular if rushing everything in the end. Then, the left hand fast octaves completely overwhelmed the harmonies of the melody in the right hand. Octaves are a part of a kontrapunkt, not melody. Finally, in pp part, the melody again all but disappeared - this time, behind the harmonic accompaniment. So, nice try, but - no cigar.

[@TheIndependentPianist]

Hi, thank you for your comment. I welcome differing viewpoints on my channel, although I would probably recommend that you take a more constructive tone in the future, as I don't think you will make many friends with the sort of supercilious tone you are taking here! But anyway, on to your points. I'm quite surprised that you thought that my tempo was particularly fast. I listened to probably eleven or twelve recordings while making this video, and the only ones that were at around my own tempo were older recordings (Fricsay, Böhm, Scherchen were all approximately at my tempo). The only recording I found that was significantly slower was Celibidache's extraordinary reading at around quarter note=44-certainly not typical. Surprisingly, even Bernstein, who takes a remarkably slow tempo in the Lacrimosa, takes a pretty rapid tempo in the Confutatis. My version was at about quarter note=60, but most of the versions I heard were more in the 70-80 range. Even with Karajan, the slowest recording I could find (with the Vienna Phil) was still several notches faster than mine (about quarter note=65 or so)-so I'm not sure what you are referring to when you say that many people take it slower than me-I only heard one recording that was significantly slower, and most of them were quite a bit faster! If you look at the score closely, you will notice that Liszt marks fortissimo and pedal specifically for the LH part in the opening. I think he probably had in mind an effect where the torrent in the LH would threaten to overwhelm the RH (tone painting the flames of hell perhaps). I personally think that even though it is an unusual balance, in this case it is justified. Anything cleaner and more neatly balanced would lose the terrifying effect that Liszt was probably going for. Then in the answering section, again, Liszt marks pianissimo and dolcissimo-obviously asking for a very different sound, a completely different world in fact. I think any attempt to "voice" the melody in the normal way would simply make the effect of this section prosaic. Also, I think saying that a counterpoint (kontrapunkt) is not a melody, is definitely missing the point of counterpoint in the first place-the idea that multiple independent linear lines can be balanced one on top of the other-one not necessarily more important than another. In this case the counterpoint is certainly not the leading line, but it plays a very important role in the overall mood of this passage, and should not be relegated to mere accompaniment. Anyway, just my thoughts on the points you raise. I thank you for taking the trouble to write a comment, but I don't think your criticisms are very well founded in reason or fact-and I also find them lacking in politeness!

[@bach_solo]

@@TheIndependentPianist First, I am sorry if you perceived my reply as not constructive and perchance aggressive. I was not after you or your playing, but I wanted to highlight a few things that took me aback when I listened to your play. My mental image of Requiem is from Karajan and some older Russian recordings (perchance Rozhdestvensky, but I am not sure). Indeed, I did not time Karajan and your beats for comparison purposes. I just remember the very steady, swaying, menacing rhythm of the bass while top voice, when it enters, is clearly dominating and leading. Your interpretation sounded to me still too hasty and too loud in the left hand/bass when the harmonies in the right hand come. Indeed, most modern recordings of Requiem are simply terribly, unjustifiably fast, as though performers rush to shove that body underground already... Even though couterpoint indeed carries a few melodic lines, in that particular excerpt, the dominating line, in my opinion, "asks" to be clearly shown. This is Mozart, after all, not Bach. You are correct with a "different world" description of the contrasting section (which is how I remember it from the performances I heard). Yet, it looks to me the polyphony in there is based on a leading voice that is harmonized by others. It sounded a bit muddled to me. But I sincerely appreciate your drive to return Requiem to the realm of proper tempi!