Anna Quaranta, The beautiful Countess and the Grek God. Thalberg and Liszt confront Verdi

A comparative analysis of Liszt’s and Thalberg’s operatic paraphrases and/or fantasies has been rarely attempted hitherto in the secondary literature. The present essay focuses on the piano arrangements by both composers from Verdi’s Il Trovatore and Rigoletto. A methodological approach seeks to evaluate the four compositions according to criteria deriving from the pieces themselves. As a result a substantially different view of the two operas emerges in Liszt’s and Thalberg’s paraphrases. Liszt concentrates his work on a single scene (Miserere from Trovatore, the celebrated Quartet from Rigoletto), interpreting it as the focal point of the whole opera and trying to render by purely musical means a strong idea of the plot’s dramatic kernel, while Thalberg’s compositions are based on favourite themes from the operas, and follow the traditional three-part structure described by Czerny in his Systematische Anleitung zum Fantasieren auf dem Pianoforte (1829). While Liszt translates theatrical immediacy to the keyboard, Thalberg offers in both cases a well-articulated and accurate reading of the whole, according to compositional strategies one is tempted to label as “narrative”.

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