Popular Piano Pieces, Vol. 8
The eighth album of popular piano pieces covers a wide variety of
music, from Gluck to Godowsky. The collection opens with a transcription by the
great nineteenth century virtuoso Franz Liszt of one of Schubert's most popular
songs, Die Forelle, which tells of the sad fate of a trout, clever, but not
clever enough to avoid being caught. The original poem added a caution to
unwary girls, but Schubert omitted the moral of the tale.
The famous Austrian violinist Fritz Kreisler provided himself with a number of short pieces that he might play at the end of a recital or on a single side of a record. Liebesfreud, the other side of the coin to Liebesleid, the Sorrow of Love, was transcribed for the piano by the Russian pianist, composer and conductor Sergey Rakhmaninov.
Liszt, Hungarian by birth, was taken to Paris as a boy and settled there until an affair with a married woman, the Comtesse Marie d'Agoult, obliged him to