Isoldes liebestod transcription franz liszt biography

Some time ago we had previously devoted a blog post to our new Urtext edition of Liszt’s piano transcription Isolde’s Liebestod (HN 558) in order to consider the various readings of the sources (see Wagner, Liszt, and Isolde ‘slurred’ – how well do composers proofread their own works?).

Today, we’re going to re-examine the piece closely, for it has much to offer not only pianists, but also philologists…

If the passages addressed in the first blog text were to turn out to be totally blatant blunders by the engraver of the first edition, we would still come across other contradictions in the sources that can’t be cleared up so easily.

Posing just such a problem is an important lost source. Specifically, there is no existing engraver’s model, so that missing is the usual copy of the autograph (done as a rule by a professional copyist) that the publishing house then used as a fine, legible model for engraving the first edition.

Short digression: Why can’t the autograph itself hav