Thalberg - L'art du chant appliqué au piano, Vol. I & II - Victoria Power
Autor: Erlen | Publicado: 2009-03-18T05:14:00-07:00


In November 1835 Thalberg arrived in Paris. He performed on November 16, 1835, at a private concert of the Austrian ambassador Count Rudolph Apponyi. On January 24, 1836, he took part in a concert of the "Society of the Paris Conservatoire concerts", playing his "Grande fantaisie" op.22. Thalberg was praised by many of the most prominent artists, among them Rossini and Meyerbeer.
Chopin didn't share his fellow artists' enthusiasm. After hearing Thalberg play, in Vienna, Chopin wrote: " He plays splendidly, but he's not my man. He's younger than I and pleases the ladies - makes potpourris on La Muette - produces his piano and forte with the pedal, not the hand- takes tenths as I do octaves and wears diamond shirt studs.

His début at the Conservatoire concert was in the Revue et Gazette musicale of January 31, 1836, p.38f, enthusiastically reviewed by Hector Berlioz.

The Parisian Ménestrel of March 13, 1836 wrote:

Moscheles, Kalkbrenner, Chopin, Liszt and Herz are and will always be for me great artists, but Thalberg is the creator of a new art which I do not know how to compare to anything that existed before him ... Thalberg is not only the premier pianist of the world, he is also an extremely distinguished composer. […]

Franz Liszt, who had — until then — regarded himself as Europe's leading piano virtuoso, had heard of Thalberg's successes during the winter 1835-36 in Geneva, in spring 1836 in Lyon, and in Paris. According to his letter to Marie d'Agoult of April 29, 1836, he felt as if he himself were the exiled Napoleon. On January 8, 1837, in the Revue et Gazette musicale, a review by Liszt of some of Thalberg's piano works appeared. The editors of the Revue et Gazette musicale added a remark, they would not share Liszt's opinions and were not responsible for it. Liszt claimed that all of Thalberg's music was completely worthless. He lost many friends and made many enemies with this.

After Thalberg had for a second time arrived in Paris in the beginning of February 1837, a kind of rivalry flowed between him and Liszt, the admirers of the both pianists were to blame for this or the tickets sellers. However, this didn't reflected on Liszt and Thalberg, their paths crossed several times, and their relationship was always cordial. While Liszt was heard in more than a dozen of concerts, Thalberg only gave on March 12, 1837, a concert in the Paris Conservatoire and a further concert on April 2, 1837. To this came on March 31, 1837, a benefit concert to raise money for Italian refugees, where Thalberg as well as Liszt performed. Liszt distributed free tickets, and asked prominent critics to write positive reviews of some of his concerts. But in his later years he admitted that Thalberg had had many more admirers and much more success in Paris than he himself. According to Liszt, his own playing had been a "Tohuwabohu von Gefühlen" ("a complete chaos of emotions"). Czerny, who in spring 1837 had travelled to Paris, was terrified when listening to his former pupil Liszt play. There are contemporary reviews from Paris, in which Liszt got the advice to take Thalberg as a model for his own playing. […]

Sigismond Thalberg was one of the most famous and most successful piano composers of the 19th century. During the 1830s and the 1840s it was his style that dominated European piano-playing.With very few exceptions, the only critique he experienced was admiration. Everything he did was at once in fashion and was imitated by others. In 1852, Wilhelm von Lenz wrote:

The piano playing of the present day, to tell the truth, consists only of Thalberg simple, Thalberg amended, and Thalberg exaggerated; scratch what is written for the piano, and you will find Thalberg.

Ten years later, in 1862, a London correspondent of the Revue et Gazette musicale wrote:

Nobody in fact has been so much imitated; his manner has been parodied, exaggerated, twisted, tortured, and it may have happened more than once to all of us to curse this Thalbergian school.

Expressions like "exaggerated", "twisted" and "tortured" are indicating that some contemporaries were starting to get a feeling of a problematic aspect of Thalberg's fame and his style. They had apparently heard too much of it. It was in this time when Thalberg's career as composer and as virtuoso came to an end. [...]

Extracted from Wikipedia




Sigismond Thalberg


L'art du chant appliqué au piano

Piano transcriptions of  Songs and Opera arias 

Vol. I &amp; II


Victoria Power, piano