Description

In the summer of 1881, Franz Liszt composed a work he called the "Valse oubliée" (Forgotten Waltz) in a letter to his publisher. The piece evokes the appealing piano waltzes Liszt wrote in his youth, though with a certain distance from the typical waltz style. While Liszt does not renounce virtuosity and elegance, he infuses these qualities with nostalgia and irony by embedding familiar melodic and rhythmic elements of salon waltzes within innovative, harmonically unconventional progressions. In the years that followed, Liszt composed three additional "Valses oubliées", but the first, published here as a single edition, has become the most beloved of these "Forgotten Waltzes" by far.