"Georges (György) Cziffra (1921-1994), the piano virtuoso of Hungarian gypsy origin, developed bewildering skills of improvisation and technical brilliance at the piano. His deep fascination with Franz Liszt's music influenced his playing style and musical spirit, and his critics, highly speaking of his Romantic pianism and especially emphasizing his virtuosity, often held him as one of the most outstanding Liszt performers of our age. Cziffra's love for Hungarian themes moved him to perform and record numerous improvisations based on Magyar melodies. Later in his life he preserved many of his own extemporized adaptations in notation, including his transcriptions of fifteen of the Hungarian Dances by Johannes Brahms. The focus of the paper is on Georges Cziffra's two piano transcriptions (1957 and 1982-83) of Brahms' Fifth Hungarian Dance (1868). The examination and analysis of these two versions in comparison with the original Hungarian sources and Brahms' own arrangement reveal Cziffra's style as a virtuoso improviser and transcriber. Examples from Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies serve to identify the Lisztian features in Cziffra's transcriptions. The characteristic elements of the Hungarian gypsy musicians' improvisatory style, which influenced and inspired both Liszt and Brahms, as well as Cziffra, receive particular attention. Chapter 2 offers a brief history of the Hungarian gypsy musicians, depicts their life and social status in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, examines the most characteristic elements of their performance technique, and portrays their musical-stylistic influence on Hungarian music, the stylistic conglomeration of which became the foundation for the renowned style hongrois. Chapter 3 examines the acquaintance of Liszt and Brahms with Hungarian music in the gypsy style and reviews basic information about Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies and Brahms' Hungarian Dances. Chapter 4 offers biographical information about György Cziffra and investigates his association with the music of Liszt, Brahms, and the Hungarian gypsy musicians. Cziffra's musical and transcribing style and a general discussion of his Transcriptions: Grandes Etudes de Concert I (Frankfurt: Peters, 1995) are also included here. Chapter 5 consists of information about the sources of the popular themes that Brahms used for the Hungarian Dances. Then the focus of this chapter is on the evolution of the Fifth Hungarian Dance from its sources through Brahms to the transcriptions of Cziffra, including the examination of Cziffra's 1957 transcription in comparison to the 1982-83 version. Selected examples of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies are provided to support the identification of Lisztian features in Cziffra's work. The detection of the characteristic elements of the Hungarian gypsies' improvisatory style will receive particular attention."--Abstract from author supplied metadata.

Transcultural modernism -- Verbunkos -- Identity, nationalism, and modernism -- Modernism and authenticity -- Listening to transcultural tonal practices -- The verbunkos idiom in the music of the future -- Idiomatic lateness

Much of Franz Liszt's musical legacy has often been dismissed as 'trivial’ or 'merely showy,' more or less peripheral contributions to nineteenth-century European culture. But Liszt was a mainstream composer in ways most of his critics have failed to acknowledge; he was also an incessant and often extremely successful innovator. Liszt's mastery of fantasy and sonata traditions, his painstaking settings of texts ranging from erotic verse to portions of the Catholic liturgy, and the remarkable self-awareness he demonstrated even in many of his most 'entertaining' pieces: all these things stamp him not only as a master of Romanticism and an early Impressionist, but as a precursor of Postmodern 'pop.' Liszt's Music places Liszt in historical and cultural focus. At the same time, it examines his principal contributions to musical literature -- from his earliest operatic paraphrases to his final explorations of harmonic and formal possibilities. Liszt's compositional methods, including his penchant for revision, problems associated with early editions of some of his works, and certain aspects of class and gender issues are also discussed. The first book-length assessment of Liszt as composer since Humphrey Searle’s 1956 volume, Liszt's Music is illustrated with well over 100 musical examples.

Some of the most popular works of nineteenth-century music were labeled either "Hungarian" or "Gypsy" in style, including many of the best-known and least-respected of Liszt's compositions. In the early twentieth century, Béla Bartók and his colleagues questioned not only the Hungarianness but also the good taste of that style. Bartók argued that it should be discarded in favor of a national style based in the "genuine" folk music of the rural peasantry. Between the heyday of the nineteenth-century Hungarian-Gypsy style and its replacement by a new paradigm of "authentic" national style was a vigorous decades-long debate-one little known inside or outside Hungary-over what it meant to be Hungarian, European, and modern. Redefining Hungarian Music from Liszt to Bartók traces the historical process that defined the conventions of Hungarian-Gypsy style. Author Lynn M. Hooker frames her study around the 1911 celebration of Liszt's centennial. In so doing, she analyzes Liszt's problematic role as a Hungarian-born composer and leader of Hungarian art music who spent most of his life outside of Hungary and questioned whether Hungary's national music was more the creation of Hungarians or Roma (Gypsies). The themes of race and nation that emerge in the discussion of Liszt are further developed in an analysis of discourse on Hungarian national music throughout the Hungarian press in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Showing how the "discovery" of "genuine" folk music by Bartók and Kodály, often depicted as a purely "scientific" matter, responds directly to concerns raised by earlier writers about the "problem of Hungarian music," Hooker argues that the innovations of Bartók and Kodály and their circle are not so much in correcting a flawed concept of the national as in using the idea of national authenticity to open up freedom for composers to explore more stylistic options, including the exploration of modernist musical language. Meticulously researched and elegantly written, Redefining Hungarian Music from Liszt to Bartók is essential reading for musicologists, musicians, and concertgoers alike.

Offering comprehensive coverage of classical music, this guide surveys more than eleven thousand albums and presents biographies of five hundred composers and eight hundred performers, as well as twenty-three essays on forms, eras, and genres of classical music. Original.