Piano Forum

I'm going to go against the grain and say that La Campanella is more difficult.  I have some reasons too!

I'm currently working on the F minor, about a month in a half in (prepping it for my lessons in September).  I've never exclusively worked on la Campanella, but I've played around with the piece and am aware of what's going on in it technically.

I'm not saying either of the pieces are easy, but I've found the 'harder' parts of La Campanella more difficult than the 'harder' parts of the F minor.

The left hand in the F minor isn't as bad as it's made out to be... it has similar passagework to the middle section of the Liebestraum, and if you are acquainted with broken alternate technique (instead of 5-4-2-1 doing 5-2-4-1), then a lot of the left hand in the faster bits should be intuitive.  There are never any disgusting leaps EXCEPT the stuff that comes up around measure 14 (the groups of triplets going up by octaves for the right hand), and that is pretty on par with some of the leaping stuff in La Campanella. 

The Stretta (which I haven't spent too much time on yet) has typical octaves you'd see in Liszt...la Campanella also does, and I can say that I'd rather have the option of legato fingering octaves in this one than the leaps at the end of La Campanella.

Aside from these, a major reason why this piece (to me) seems more straightforward and generally less difficult is because of the large amount of RECURRING passagework.  La Campanella throws a ton of different variations at the player, while this one keeps the same techniques but in different keys (there are obviously a few exceptions).

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Now, la Campanella has a load of material that I can't understand someone saying it's 'easier' than the F minor. 

-4-5 trills (or 3-4, 3-5 if you have large hands)
-the fast passage with the repeated notes (the 2nd interlude in B major)... that whole part is a monster.  That requires so much finger independence, accuracy, and dexterity in order to execute that passage and make it sound nice!  There aren't any areas with rapid repeated notes (except one set of Db octaves) in the F minor.
-the awkwardness of this piece for me trumps the awkwardness of the F minor.

... the one thing I'll give the F minor in terms of difficulty is getting a good sound, because it has tons of textures, stepwise chord movement, and some strange dissonances and harmonic shifts... so it clearly has musical difficulties, but I think these are easier to access than those in La Campanella simply because the F minor has less material to wrap your fingers around.