Description
Schubert’s setting of Gretchen’s despairing monologue at the spinning wheel was met with contempt by the author of the original text, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, when he received the song from the composer in 1816. To this day, however, audiences respond with enthusiasm to this highly dramatic scene. Even in Schubert’s original, the complex structure of the piano part, which combines the steady humming of the spinning wheel in the right hand with Gretchen’s heartbeat in the left, already demands a great deal from the pianist – and this is all the more the case in Liszt’s arrangement when the melody is also transferred to the keys!
The arrangement, first issued in 1838, was already so popular during Liszt’s lifetime that the first editions published in Milan, Paris and Vienna had to be produced in numerous reprints and new engravings. This diversity of sources was conscientiously evaluated for the Urtext edition. For the mastery of the challenging musical text, Evgeny Kissin finds fingering solutions that are as ingenious as they are practical.
