An interview with Liszt's great-granddaughter Blandine Ollivier de Prévaux The following interview took place in 1970 and was originally published in Clavier. The valuable recollections and thoughts from a direct descendant of Liszt along with firsthand accounts from her father and grandfather make this a fascinating story—one worth reading fo...

Preparing for Liszt  The Questions & Answers column of Clavier Companion typically deals with issues related to elementary and intermediate level piano instruction. This issue of our magazine is devoted to a celebration of the bicentennial of the birth of Franz Liszt. Most of Liszt's compositions are so demanding, both in their musical cha...

Recently I saw a cartoon that showed two smiling parents watching their child as he brushed his teeth. A banner was posted over the top of the bathroom mirror that said, "Congratulations on brushing your teeth!" One parent was looking adoringly at the child, hands clasped, while the other stated, "I just feel like we're setting him up to be disappo...

More than 20,000 published works exist featuring charismatic trailblazer Franz Liszt. But biographer Alan Walker sets a new standard for Liszt scholarship, as well as musicological research and biographical writing. "The Volumes" (Dr. Walker's reference to his mammoth three-volume Liszt biography) have been honored by the Royal Philharmonic Society...

My previous articles have discussed different aspects of dealing with sounds we make as jazz/pop musicians. These include chord voicings, blues licks, scales, melodic sequences, etc. However, the truth of the matter is that these aspects are only half of the big picture when playing jazz and pop. The other half entails WHEN all of these aspects are...

You have probably seen the cartoon: Bugs Bunny cracks the knuckles of his three fingers and proceeds to play Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2. As a child I longed to perform this music the way Bugs did—with joy, élan, and, yes, like a showoff.  Many descriptions of Liszt's piano playing depict him as a wildhaired showman, a precursor of the li...

The instrumental psalm De Profundis for piano & orchestra by Franz Liszt (Raabe: 668, Searle: 691) is an unfinished, though virtually complete manuscript held by the Goethe and Schiller Archive in Weimar, Germany. It was composed during the late summer of 1834 while Liszt was staying at La Chênaie, in Brittany, having sought out the company of ...

Franz Liszt was a legendary pianist, famous for his overwhelming technical prowess and expressive power. Many today do not realize that as a teacher he had a lasting effect upon piano playing throughout Europe and even in the United States. Most of the great pianists of the nineteenth century came under his influence, whether or not they attended h...

At first glance, the scope of this issue's topic may seem limited. The majority of readers are independent teachers working with students before they leave for college. The percentage of their students who major in piano is small. However, the following articles by Dr. Timothy Shafer and Dr. Sylvia Coats contain valuable information and insights fo...

his issue concludes Clavier Companion's survey of piano methods.1 Looking back over the past two years, I have come to realize that we are blessed with a tremendous variety of excellent, pedagogically sound materials. Several of my core beliefs have been confirmed: no one series is right for every teacher, or for all of any one teacher's stude...

Note: this is a continuation of the De Profundis article found elsewhere in this September 2011 issue The following score examples will reveal several points of interest about the manuscript (of both Liszt's original and my transcription). They should provide a clearer understanding of the difficulty of transcribing the work as well as sh...