Réminiscences de Don Juan
Encyclopedia
Réminiscences de Don Juan (S. 418) is an opera
Opera
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...

 fantasy
Fantasia (music)
The fantasia is a musical composition with its roots in the art of improvisation. Because of this, it seldom approximates the textbook rules of any strict musical form ....

 for piano
Piano
The piano is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard. It is one of the most popular instruments in the world. Widely used in classical and jazz music for solo performances, ensemble use, chamber music and accompaniment, the piano is also very popular as an aid to composing and rehearsal...

 by Franz Liszt
Franz Liszt
Franz Liszt ; ), was a 19th-century Hungarian composer, pianist, conductor, and teacher.Liszt became renowned in Europe during the nineteenth century for his virtuosic skill as a pianist. He was said by his contemporaries to have been the most technically advanced pianist of his age...

 on themes from Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart , baptismal name Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart , was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical era. He composed over 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, piano, operatic, and choral music...

's Don Giovanni
Don Giovanni
Don Giovanni is an opera in two acts with music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and with an Italian libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte. It was premiered by the Prague Italian opera at the Teatro di Praga on October 29, 1787...

. It is extremely technically demanding. For this reason, and perhaps also because of its length and dramatic intensity, it does not appear in concert programmes as often as Liszt's lighter and more popular pieces, such as the Rigoletto paraphrase. As Ferruccio Busoni
Ferruccio Busoni
Ferruccio Busoni was an Italian composer, pianist, editor, writer, piano and composition teacher, and conductor.-Biography:...

 says in the preface to his 1918 edition of the work, the Réminiscences carries "an almost symbolic significance as the highest point of pianism." Liszt wrote the work in 1841 and published a two-piano version (S. 656) in 1877. The two-piano version bears a structurally strong resemblance to the original.

The piece begins with music sung by the Commendatore, both from the graveyard scene where he threatens Don Giovanni ("Di rider finirai pria dell aurora! Ribaldo audace! Lascia a' morti la pace!" — "Your laughter will not last, even till morning. Remember, that the dead still remember!") and from the finale where he condemns Don Giovanni to Hell
Hell
In many religious traditions, a hell is a place of suffering and punishment in the afterlife. Religions with a linear divine history often depict hells as endless. Religions with a cyclic history often depict a hell as an intermediary period between incarnations...

. The love duet of Don Giovanni and Zerlina follows ("La ci darem la mano"), along with two variations on this theme, then an extended fantasy on the Champagne aria
Aria
An aria in music was originally any expressive melody, usually, but not always, performed by a singer. The term is now used almost exclusively to describe a self-contained piece for one voice usually with orchestral accompaniment...

 ("Fin ch'han dal vino"), and finally the work concludes with the Commandatore's threat.

In contrast to perhaps the majority of opera fantasies composed during the nineteenth century, Liszt's Don Giovanni paraphrase is a much more tightly controlled and significant work. Where the standard opera transcription is merely a collection of famous tunes,
"The finest of [Liszt's] opera fantasies...are much more than that: they juxtapose different parts of the opera in ways that bring out a new significance, while the original dramatic sense of the individual number and its place within the opera is never out of sight." (Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation, p. 528)


While not reaching the heights of difficulty of the 1838 version of Liszt's Transcendental Studies (Études d'exécution transcendante), the Réminiscences makes a great number of extreme technical demands on the pianist, among them hair-raising passages in chromatic
Chromaticism
Chromaticism is a compositional technique interspersing the primary diatonic pitches and chords with other pitches of the chromatic scale. Chromaticism is in contrast or addition to tonality or diatonicism...

 thirds
Interval (music)
In music theory, an interval is a combination of two notes, or the ratio between their frequencies. Two-note combinations are also called dyads...

, and an instance of rapid leaps in both hands across almost the whole width of the keyboard that, in the words of Heinrich Neuhaus
Heinrich Neuhaus
Heinrich Gustavovich Neuhaus was a Soviet pianist and pedagogue of German extraction. He taught at the Moscow Conservatory from 1922 to 1964. He was made a People's Artist of the RSFSR in 1956...

, "with the exception of Ginzburg
Grigory Ginzburg
Grigory Romanovich Ginzburg was a Jewish-born, Russian pianist.-Biography:Ginzburg first studied with his mother before being accepted as a student in Alexander Goldenweiser's class at Moscow Conservatory. In 1927 he gained fourth prize in the Warsaw International Frederick Chopin Competition...

, probably nobody but the pianola
Player piano
A player piano is a self-playing piano, containing a pneumatic or electro-mechanical mechanism that operates the piano action via pre-programmed music perforated paper, or in rare instances, metallic rolls. The rise of the player piano grew with the rise of the mass-produced piano for the home in...

 played without smudges."

Alexander Scriabin
Alexander Scriabin
Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin was a Russian composer and pianist who initially developed a lyrical and idiosyncratic tonal language inspired by the music of Frédéric Chopin. Quite independent of the innovations of Arnold Schoenberg, Scriabin developed an increasingly atonal musical system,...

 injured his right hand overpracticing this piece and Balakirev
Mily Balakirev
Mily Alexeyevich Balakirev ,Russia was still using old style dates in the 19th century, and information sources used in the article sometimes report dates as old style rather than new style. Dates in the article are taken verbatim from the source and therefore are in the same style as the source...

's Islamey, and wrote the funeral march
Funeral march
A funeral march is a march, usually in a minor key, in a slow "simple duple" metre, imitating the solemn pace of a funeral procession. Some such marches are often considered appropriate for use during funerals and other sombre occasions, the most well-known being that of Chopin...

 of his First Piano Sonata in memory of his damaged hand.

Celebrated recordings of the Réminiscences include those by Jorge Bolet
Jorge Bolet
Jorge Bolet was a Cuban-born but mostly American-resident pianist and teacher.-Life:Bolet was born in Havana, and studied at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he himself taught from 1939 to 1942...

, Earl Wild
Earl Wild
Royland Earl Wild was an American pianist widely recognized as a leading virtuoso of his generation. Harold C. Schonberg called him a "super-virtuoso in the Horowitz class". He was known as well for his transcriptions of classical music and jazz...

, Simon Barere
Simon Barere
Simon Barere was a renowned Russian pianist. His Russian surname Барер is transliterated Barer, however, as an adult he changed the spelling to Barere in order to reduce the frequency of mispronunciation.-Biography:...

, Grigory Ginzburg
Grigory Ginzburg
Grigory Romanovich Ginzburg was a Jewish-born, Russian pianist.-Biography:Ginzburg first studied with his mother before being accepted as a student in Alexander Goldenweiser's class at Moscow Conservatory. In 1927 he gained fourth prize in the Warsaw International Frederick Chopin Competition...

 and Charles Rosen
Charles Rosen
Charles Rosen is an American pianist and author on music.-Life and career:In his youth he studied piano with Moriz Rosenthal. Rosenthal, born in 1862, had been a student of Franz Liszt...

, and more recent versions by Marc-André Hamelin
Marc-André Hamelin
Marc-André Hamelin, OC, CQ, is a French Canadian virtuoso pianist and composer.Born in Montreal, Quebec, Marc-André Hamelin began his piano studies at the age of five. His father, a pharmacist by trade who was also a pianist, introduced him to the works of Alkan, Godowsky, and Sorabji when he was...

, Valentina Lisitsa
Valentina Lisitsa
Valentina Lisitsa is a Ukrainian-born classical pianist. Lisitsa resides in North Carolina in the USA. Her husband, Alexei Kuznetsoff, is also a pianist and her partner in a number of piano duets.- Biography :Lisitsa was born in Kiev, Ukraine, in 1973...

, Min Kwon
Min Kwon
is a Korean-American pianist and Professor of Music at . Previously, she also taught piano minor and chamber music at The Juilliard School in New York.-Background:...

 and Lang Lang
Lang Lang
Lang Lang may refer to:* Lang Lang , Chinese pianist* Lang Lang, Victoria, a town in Australia* Lang Lang River, a river in Gippsland, Victoria, Australia* A character from the Japanese manga Steam Detectives-See also:...

.
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