The publication in 1970 of the first volume of the Neue Liszt Ausgabe (NLA) marked the beginning of an ambitious enterprise: to make available, as the inaugural editors-in-chief described it, ‘all [of] Franz Liszt's musical works in a form which will satisfy all musicological and practical requirements’.Footnote 1 The retroactively named Alte Liszt Ausgabe Footnote 2 had sought a similar goal, and while it had issued a number of important volumes during its 29 years of existence, much of Liszt's total output of well over 1,000 works had yet to be published. The NLA organized Liszt's works into ten series, of which the first two – Original works for solo piano, and Free arrangements and transcriptions for solo piano – are now complete in 42 volumes.

Perhaps one of the most persistent trends to emerge as the two series developed was that for Liszt, completing a work in the traditional sense – that is, premiering or publishing one work and moving on to the next – was not as decisive an act as it was, say, for Liszt's colleague Richard Wagner. Liszt revised and republished original works; transcribed the same work again and again, sometimes for different scorings; abandoned essentially complete drafts; tabled drafts for decades; and ported significant chunks of drafted material from one work to another. In short, his working methods are not easily accommodated by the editorial policy of the ‘Fassung letzter Hand’, in which the optimal source is the one last authorized by the composer, and which the NLA initially followed. Indeed, as the NLA released more volumes, its editors acknowledged that for some works or complex of works, an optimal source might not always be available; for others, by contrast, several such sources might exist. How, then, to deal with the different, sometimes wildly divergent, ‘Fassungen’?

Later volumes, especially those in Series II, dealt with the issue by including earlier versions of works that Liszt completed in an appendix; but since this policy was adopted well into the production of the two series, not all important early works were included. Thus, beginning in 2005, the NLA began work on supplemental volumes to the first two series.Footnote 3 The three volumes under review here belong to this group, and collectively they offer a conspectus of Liszt's unsettled, highly self-critical compositional style. The most homogenous of the three is volume 11, which contains the first versions of Liszt's solo piano arrangements of Beethoven's Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Symphonies, as well as the celebrated Funeral March from the Third. These arrangements occupied Liszt during the second half of the 1830s, a period in which he arguably brought the genres of concert fantasy and transcription to a new level of artistry and virtuosity.

Consistent with the earlier versions of the ‘Paganini’ and ‘Transcendental’ Etudes, the first versions of Liszt's arrangements of Beethoven's Symphonies are even more technically demanding than their ‘definitive’ versions from 1865 (NLA, Series II, vols 17–19), particularly in the outer movements. Imre Mező, co-editor-in-chief of the NLA since 1973, has edited this material admirably. Although Liszt published all four works in the early 1840s and only the autograph to the Seventh Symphony survives,Footnote 4 these sources are not entirely free from problems. In particular, the editions of the Sixth Symphony published by Breitkopf & Härtel and Richault differ slightly in their readings of movement IV, bars 136–144, and movement V, bars 132–140. Mező reminds us that ‘from the point of view of an understanding of Liszt's creative method … proof-reading was an occasion and opportunity to further perfect the composition in question and repeatedly review the written, indeed already engraved, form of the work’ (p. 185). Mező further suggests that these changes reflect Liszt's ever-present search for ‘means of improvement’ to his works. However, the differences between the two contemporaneous editions may not reflect aesthetic decisions as much as they do practical ones: the Richault readings seem designed to compensate for a piano with a feeble lower register, while the Breitkopf readings take advantage of a piano with quicker action. In providing alternate readings, Liszt demonstrated a sensitivity to the capabilities of the instruments on which his arrangements would have been performed (or at least attempted), whether they were Érard, Graf, or Pleyel.

Although these supplemental volumes ostensibly aim to complete Liszt's works for solo piano, the headliner to supplemental volume 9 is in fact a piece for viola and piano, Liszt's arrangement of Berlioz's Harold en Italie. Liszt had inaugurated his career as an arranger by famously publishing a version of the Symphonie fantastique for solo piano in 1834, an act of homage and generosity that helped set the stage for Berlioz's successful concert tours abroad in the 1840s. Compared to that arrangement, however, Liszt's Harold arrangement had a far more complicated gestation: started in 1836 and completed in late 1837, it remained in Berlioz's possession, mostly forgotten, until 1852, when Liszt revised the manuscript in several places. While this version made it as far as an engraving copy (although lacking a publisher), it got lost again, this time for almost a quarter of a century. Upon its rediscovery, the Parisian firm of Brandus released Liszt's arrangement in 1880, almost 45 years after its initial rendering.

Editors Adrienne Kaczmarczyk and Eszter Mikusi have elegantly and clearly pieced together this circuitous route from conception to publication in their excellent introduction and critical report. Given that almost no scholarship exists on this arrangement, the editors’ introduction, rich in detailed footnotes, is particularly welcome, as scholars can now better contextualize Liszt's extensive catalogue of arrangements of Berlioz's orchestral music. Moreover, their editing of the music offers a significant improvement over the Brandus edition – which has been republished several times over the last 130 years – by clarifying performance markings, correcting notational mistakes and bringing the arrangement into conformity with the scholarly edition of Berlioz's full score.

The other works in the volume vary in terms of completion and quality, yet each is subjected to the same editorial rigor as the Harold arrangement. The Fantasie über Themen aus Figaros Hochzeit und Don Juan von Mozart is a nice example of the editors’ attempt to provide an accessible, source-critical edition. In 1912 Ferruccio Busoni issued this work in a heavily altered version, which would remain the only point of entry until Leslie Howard released an edition in 1997 that was more faithful to the single extant autograph source.Footnote 5 Whereas Howard supplied the performer with ample editorial directions and added a rousing conclusion to the unfinished manuscript, Kaczmarczyk and Mikusi take a more cautious approach, adding the obligatory clefs, key signatures, and accidentals, but withholding judgment on whether to omit passages which Liszt himself deemed questionable (e.g. bars 74–75, 78–79, 84–85, 335–337, 351, 537, before 554). Moreover, they choose to leave the work incomplete. While this decision makes sense from a scholarly perspective, those who wish to perform this neglected work will still have to refer to Howard's edition. Editio Musica Budapest holds the copyright to both editions – could Howard's editorial conclusion not have been furnished in the critical notes to Kaczmarczyk's and Mikusi's edition, if for no other reason than sake of completion?Footnote 6

Indeed, most of the remaining pieces in volume 9 and many of the pieces in volume 6 exist in fragmentary form. Nevertheless, these artefacts reveal much about Liszt as composer. This is especially true for volume 6, whose contents – first, second, even third sketches of the same piece – clarify the history of one of Liszt's most ambitious works for solo piano published definitively during his years at Weimar: the Harmonies poétiques et religieuses. This is a complex of works which the editor, Adrienne Kaczmarczyk, has been decoding for years, the results of which inform her preface (pp. xxviii–xlii). While the earliest and last versions of the work have been published in the NLA (Series I, vol. 9), the relationship between the two merits detailed explanation. Volume 6 contains selections from the so-called ‘Tasso’ Sketchbook, which Liszt used during the latter part of his concert years. In it can be found a number of pieces that belong to an 11-movement cycle that Liszt envisioned around 1845 and 1846. Liszt decoupled some of these pieces from the set and used them elsewhere (such as the Élégie sur des motifs du Prince Louis Ferdinand and the second ‘Petrarch’ Sonnet), while others he abandoned. Kaczmarczyk's volume contains nine pieces from this sketchbook (pp. 3–54). Although only two are complete – in that they sport a final double bar line – when taken together with the other fragments it becomes clear that Liszt initially had a conception of the work that was far more homogeneous than its ultimate progeny in terms of its melodic profiles, accompanimental patterns, formal structures and dramatic pacing.

This unified compositional aesthetic is thrown into even greater relief when compared with the incarnation of the Harmonies from 1847/48 (pp. 55–136). Preserved in the ‘Harmonies’ Sketchbook housed in Weimar, this version clearly prefigures the final version of 1853, with ‘Invocation’, ‘Hymne de l'enfant à son réveil’, ‘Miserere d'après Palestrina’ and other movements approaching their final shape. On the other hand, the beautiful piece in E flat major, subtitled ‘Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude’, bears minimal resemblance to the gorgeous piece of the same name that occupies the third slot in the Harmonies of 1853. While many of these intermediary works have already been published in a performing edition by Albert Brussee,Footnote 7 Kaczmarczyk's volume answers substantive questions of transmission, revision and context that these Harmonies ask of the scholar and performer.

Each volume boasts an introduction in German, English and Hungarian, though the critical reports appear only in English. The English translations from the Hungarian originals are generally strong, although at times the phrasing is inelegant. However, mistakes in the prose can usually be deduced by context or in consultation with the original or German. For example, ‘In pp. 1–7 on the first page’ (vol. 6, p. xxxiv) should read ‘In lines 1–7 on the first page’. More serious are the oversights that impact the musical reading, such as bar 335, left hand, of the ‘Figaro’/'Don Juan’ Fantasy (vol. 9, p. 113), or the missing G flats in bar 61, right hand, of the Prélude (vol. 6, p. 10) from the ‘Tasso’ Sketchbook. Similarly, the editorially furnished ‘*)’ – used to indicate a footnote – above bar 2 of the Hymne de la nuit (vol. 6, p. 60), lacks any explanation at all. And the introduction to volume 11 notes that ‘The Haslinger & Richault editions of the Sixth Symphony differ in the fourth and fifth movements’ (p. xvii), when in fact it is the Breitkopf and Richault editions that differ. (Haslinger published Liszt's arrangement of the Seventh Symphony, not the Sixth.) Given what these editors have had to sift through in order to make presentable editions of much of this material, such slips of the pen are understandable, perhaps even unavoidable. In any event, their presence in no way diminishes the overall impression of these supplemental volumes, which consistently demonstrate a high level of scholarship. Hopefully once the remaining supplemental volumes are published, the NLA will turn its attention to the other eight series, bringing as much of Liszt's music to light in a way that will indeed satisfy all manner of musicologists and performers.