Piano Forum

My goal is to learn the set. I've learned so many small details behind fingering and technique. For example, the jump in Mazeppa bar 22 into a tenth in the left hand. The fingering of the 3 notes immediately preceding this should be 121. 123 makes for a smaller jump for the thumb but it is actually more uncomfortable and inconsistent. 121 is easier despite the bigger jump for the thumb.

Hitting the left hand fast tenths in no 2 also trains the whole arm movement, to find the edge of the keys fast, and helped me get a lot more comfortable with 9ths and 10ths.

A lot of quartal movement in no 2 and no 4, a lot of chromatic pedal point writing. A lot more distance has to be covering in the span of a 16th note than I've seen in other music. In no 6 and 8 the parts where you have the double note embedded into/surrounded by two single notes are quite challenging.

I don't really listen to Ricordanza. I think this one has the least to offer technically and I think is probably the least listened of all of them. Vadym Kholodenko skipped this one when he won the Van Cliburn competition and I really suspect people only learn this one to complete the set. 10 is kind of superficial, I don't even find it that exciting to play. This one is the easiest of the 'hard ones', and seems to get cherrypicked a lot as the go-to Liszt t. etude for those that don't want to learn the other ones, especially by amateurs on youtube. 10 is the only one I can find performances by Yundi Li, Kate Liu, Seong-Jin Cho, a few others. I know they can learn the others easily, but nonetheless it's a perfect flashy piece to pick up quickly.

It does feel like most modern performances set the bar very conservative. I've played 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 up to speed now, still working on 5, haven't done much on 11 or 12 yet. I think 4's middle section is misunderstood and it takes another level of intensity of practice and concentration to figure out how to play that section like Emil von sauer. Similarly no 2 is not very interesting to me played at 2 min 20 sec, 30 sec, so you have to learn it at Ovchinnikov tempo to really feel like you learned a lot technically from this piece.

However, all the left hand difficulty is extremely lopsided towards jumps, (the big intervals in 2, 4, the fast jumps in 5, , with a little bit of chromatic pedal point work in No 4, maybe octaves if that doesn't come naturally to you, a little bit of the descending pattern of alternating double note-then-single-note in no 10. None of these etudes' left hands are close to the Godowsky studies on op 10 no 5, 7, 12, or Petrushka, for instance. So it really opens the eyes as to how the Liszt etudes are still not that close to being the Everest of piano technique.

I would get the Henle but reference the Emil von sauer edition on IMSLP to experiment with fingerings. Some innocuous or obvious thing can make a big difference.