The Little Bell - Liszt

[NetherMagic]

Hey all, I was just listening to some piano recordings and stumbled by this song called "The Little Bell" composed by Liszt, and HOLY SCHMOLY is it awesome!  I just wanna ask if this piece is by any chance part of the Liszt Etudes (or something like that) and if anybody has ever played, pls tell me if there's anything that's especially hard, because my brother told me that Liszt had enormous hands and I'm not sure if this piece would contain tons of compound intervals and stuff that would be too big for my hand to reach

thx

[ludwig]

hey,


 If you're refering to la campanella (bells), one of the etude's by liszt, then you're right about the technical difficulty, it is a pretty demanding work, and having hands and fingers bigger will be to your advantage... I played it two years ago, and I have tiny hands, it was pretty tricky. Also I noticed another thread titled campanella by stevek :

https://www.pianoforum.net/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board=perf;action=display;num=1036742225

talking about how he's recorded his performance, is this the piece you're refering to? can you describe it?

[NetherMagic]

yup yup this is the exact piece I want

it sounds like bells (go figure) really like how it keeps a steady melody of a trill at the very top and it has lyke 3 different melodies at the same time

dunno howta describe it, you should listen to it for yourself =)

[trunks]

I love the enchanting theme throughout the piece, although Liszt owed it to the violinist Paganini.

Big hands won't help much here and neither are small hands disadvantageous in playing this piece, because we are not talking about wide stretches here, but wide leaps/jumps, a technique entirely different from stretches.

La campanella doesn't have the widest of all Lisztian leaps either - that credit should go to his la leggierezza (second of 3 concert studies). Nor the most difficult to handle - the credit goes to many of his other works, notably vision & harmonies du soir (transcendental studies 6 & 11), il lamento (first of 3 concert studies), Hungarian Rhapsodies No.6, 13 and Apres une lecture du Dante, all having double-hand and/or double-note leaps.

Endurance, however, is essential when playing the la campanella, because the passages that require jumps are quite long and numerous. It is advisable to make good use of a loose right arm.