Liszt's Transcendental Etude No 10 in F Minor vs La Campanella

[pytheamateur]

I play neither piece at the moment.  Out of the two above etudes, one has been suggested as my next piece to learn, but in fact I prefer the other one.  Is there a general consensus as to which one is more challenging technically?  I am hoping people will say the one I prefer is less difficult.

By the way, I am told there is actually a Russian nickname for Transcendental Etude No.10, which translates roughly to "the love of crabs".

[david456103]

i tried both, but only learned one successfully(la campanella). That could be because I really didn't like transcedental etude no. 10, but liked la campanella a lot. I'd say they are roughly equal technically demanding, so go for the one you like better. If I HAD to pick one that is more technically challenging, I'd go with transcedental etude 10 since it has more awkward spots than campanella.

[j_menz]

TE10 has more varied challenges than La Campanella, but there's not that much in it depending, of course, on your own strengths and weaknesses. TE10 is also more difficult to pull of musically.

Neither is a walk in the park, so pick the one you like best - you're going to be playing a lot of it!

[philb]

It Depends on how fast you would like to play TE 10. The left hand is rather excruciating in some spots.

[danhuyle]

Play them both. They're great pieces. They're both challenging in their own respect and have their own set of problems.

Anyway, my teacher refused to help me with TE10 and instead I taught La Campanella and TE9.

Based on that, TE10 is clearly the hardest.

[pytheamateur]

Thanks for everyone's input.  My preference is La Campanella.  I don't mind it being too popular as I am not playing the piano for exam or competition purposes.

I was slightly surprised that the consensus is that TE10 is harder.  I suppose one hears La Campanella being talked about a lot more with its famous jumps and trills; maybe that makes one perceive it to be a bit more difficult than it actually is.

I've started dabbling with La Campanella again and am having fun with it.  I think it's a good exercise to force one to release tension in the arms.  Let's see if I can persuade my teacher to teach this piece.

[david456103]

yea, at first the jumps are hard, but you get used to them after a while.

[werq34ac]

WHATT??? HOW IS LA CAMPANELLA BETTER THAN TE10???

Sorry, TE10 is one of my favorite Liszt etudes.

And yes I agree it's more difficult than La Campanella because it's more awkward. Though I hear if you can nail that first... thingy... with the 1st inversion chords... with both hands on top of each other (help me out, what do I call it?) then you can pretty much nail the rest of the piece. But that's what I heard, and besides, they weren't 100% serious. But they were serious that that's the hardest part.

[fftransform]

TE10 is a bit harder, IMO.

[philb]

TE10 is a bit harder, IMO.

Very insightful indeed. Care to explain certain technical problems you've encountered? Or do you feel your one line of text is a sufficient answer?

[pytheamateur]

It seems La Campanella would please a non-piano playing audience more easily.  The tune is more accessible. The ending sounds impressive, and the bonus is those chords at the last couple of pages are a lot easier than they really are (I'd say they are probably the easiest part of the piece).  Do you agree?

[rachmaninoff_forever]

The ending sounds impressive, and the bonus is those chords at the last couple of pages are a lot easier than they really are (I'd say they are probably the easiest part of the piece).  Do you agree?

I think the jumps that La Campanella is most famous for are the easiest.  Especially the first and third pages.

But I guess on it's own the last few chords aren't that hard.  But by the time you get there you're already burnt out, so they're so much harder.



But ANYWAYS, this guy is probably gonna blast through the first three pages in a shorter amount of time it actually takes to play it.  The real problems start once you get to the trills.  The 16th note octaves aren't that difficult on its own.  But like I said before, the trills are difficult and they'll burn you out so when you get to the 16th note octaves, they'll be much harder IMO.

[fftransform]

Very insightful indeed. Care to explain certain technical problems you've encountered? Or do you feel your one line of text is a sufficient answer?

It's as close to sufficiency as it can get without being more sufficient than,

It Depends on how fast you would like to play TE 10. The left hand is rather excruciating in some spots.

To insinuate that my answer is insufficient is to insinuate that yours is almost insufficient.  Frankly, I think the "in my opinion" makes it more sufficient than yours.


Sufficient?

[danhuyle]

I've started dabbling with La Campanella again and am having fun with it.  I think it's a good exercise to force one to release tension in the arms.  Let's see if I can persuade my teacher to teach this piece.

The short answer, Transcendental Etude No10 is more demanding. Why not learn both?

I created a blog post to answer this question

https://www.empowernetwork.com/successwithdan/liszt-transcendental-etude-10-vs-la-campanella/

It's what I experienced with both pieces. I list the challenges I faced with each piece.

To get best results learning La Campanella with a teacher, learn and memorize the whole piece at a slow tempo. I struggled big time with one of the passages in La Campanella and I almost gave up learning it because of that one part.

Enjoy the read and look forward to hearing you play both pieces. Why not start a project thread?

[pytheamateur]

The short answer, Transcendental Etude No10 is more demanding. Why not learn both?

I created a blog post to answer this question

https://www.empowernetwork.com/successwithdan/liszt-transcendental-etude-10-vs-la-campanella/

It's what I experienced with both pieces. I list the challenges I faced with each piece.

To get best results learning La Campanella with a teacher, learn and memorize the whole piece at a slow tempo. I struggled big time with one of the passages in La Campanella and I almost gave up learning it because of that one part.

Enjoy the read and look forward to hearing you play both pieces. Why not start a project thread?

Thanks for this.  I'll go and read it now.  I have got too many projects going on at the moment so cannot learn both at the same time.  On the whole I like slow lyrical pieces but it seems not a bad idea to have a show-off piece.  I recently played at a local concert, performing Rachmaninov's Prelude in D Op 23 No 4 and Mozart's Turkish March.  The crowed clearly preferred the latter, although I think it was the weaker piece with a fair amount of wrong notes.

[nanabush]

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).

-----

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.

[pytheamateur]

Perhaps this should go on a separate thread, but since it concerns La Campanella I thought I'd put it here.

I'm trying to compare the time it takes to learn a Liszt etude like La Campanella with a Chopin etude like Op 25, No 12.

One striking difference between the two is the Ocean Etude is repetitive while there's quite a bit of variation within La Campanella (the same seems to be true for many of their eudes).  It seems La Campanella involves 3 to 4 times more types of technique than the Ocean Etude. It took me about 6 months to get the Ocean Etude up to a reasonable standard; does this mean it would take me at least 2 years to get La Campanella to a similar standard?

[itsdingy]

TE 10 is more difficult.
Why? Because La Campanella is much simpler as a piece.
I played both and can comfortably say that this etude challenges not only the techniques and the jumps, but also fluidity. Playing the left and right hand is the easiest part, but the LH has to be in a constant rhythm. This is not easy to do when there are jumps spanning 2 octaves.
There are also polyrhythms too to worry about. There are 3 against 2, 3 against 4, 4 against 3, 5 against 3, and more. The technique is much more varied, meaning you must be fluent in multiple skill fields.
La Campanella doesn't have any of this, sure, it has jumps, octaves, and trills, but basically, all Liszt's pieces have that. It is a great show piece, and it's not easy by any standards, but you just can't compare them too. The technique improves with practice, but for TE 10, if you don't know what you are doing, you will never be able to get it.
I heard a lot of people suggesting about the octaves in TE 10 and the stretta. The STRETTA IS NOT THE HARDEST PART. It looks impressive, and it CERTAINLY IS HARD, but it is one of the easier parts IMO in this piece. There are so many other pitfals to worry about, and not to mention La Campanella has that too, and it's 1000x easier and simpler. The hardest parts in La Campanella is the 4-3-2 repetition near the middle, for that practice is straight forward. FOr Trascendental Etude No. 10 simple practice just doesn't cut it.

[droprenstein]

I personally find that La Campanella is not nearly as difficult as it's hyped up to be. The patterns that look and seem very impressive to the untrained eye(ear) are actually pretty straightforward. By far the hardest section is the 3rd B Major interlude, and that's fixed with a bit of slow practice. I find the repeated notes in the second section to be only moderately challenging(it certainly helps that there are a lot of black keys), and the trills in the third should be easy enough to play if one replaces their fourth finger with their third, and of course, practices. The chromatic scales are unaccompanied in the right hand, making them pretty easy to work with. A few dedicated practice sessions should make short work of most of the piece. I have pretty large hands though(can kind of stretch to an 11th), so this might be a bit biased. The real difficulty comes in maintaining accuracy and looseness. And the double broken octaves. Those are very annoying. Overall, I'd give La Campanella an 8/10 on difficulty scale. By no means an easy piece, but lightyears away from being the most difficult piece ever written.
I've never played TE 10, but I took a quick look at the score, and I'll say that this is much more difficult than La Campanella. At least 9/10, but I'd need to practice it to be absolutely sure. In fact, I'd say most of the TE's are more difficult than La Campanella(namely 4, 5, and 12).

[anacrusis]

TE10 is definitely more difficult overall - higher difficulty per bar ratio haha at the same time, the jumps in La Campanella and me are simply not friends and I just can't play them accurately, so for me it would be harder to get La Campanella to a good place than TE10. Goes to show how different we all are I guess.