Before the age of copyright and the anxious academic habit of charting "influences," works of imagination often prompted a sort of imitation in which an oddment of style, a gambit, an entire work is appropriated and retuned, so to speak, rethought, recomposed, re-imagined. Where this happens between two potent creative personalities—for instance, in the way Verdi took the fanfares of the "Tuba mirum" in Berlioz's Grande Messe des morts for his own Requiem—the upshot is neither dependence nor an infringement of what today is thought of as property rights, but a creative response that enlarges both the creator and the creation. Liszt's numerous piano transcriptions of works by everyone from Schubert and Schumann to Meyerbeer and Spohr are testimony not only to an avid desire to serve music by opening its treasures to a wide audience, but to the need to make them, in a sense, his own. Examples abound, too, in the tacit rivalry between Liszt and his friend, Alkan (e.g., in the way the Quasi-Faust movement of Alkan's Grande Sonate [1847] seems to compel the same narrative issues in Liszt's Piano Sonata in B minor [1852-1853])—though more often remarked are the instances in which Liszt has raised his own standard in a country of the soul that had seemed to belong exclusively to their mutual friend Chopin. Liszt had begun the composition of his first Ballade, that preeminently Chopin-esque invention, in 1845, though the spate of works in forms forever associated with Chopin—the Ballade No. 2, Berceuse, nocturne (e.g., three Lieder transcribed for solo piano as Liebesträume (3), or the pocket nocturne Consolation No. 3), and the two Polonaises—came only after Chopin's death in 1849. Where Chopin's polonaises are elegant, proud, often fiery, Liszt's are heroic in mien, epic in gesture, and symphonic in execution. Polonaise No. 2, composed in 1851, is a disarming melding of Chopin-esque gestures with Lisztian coruscations whose upshot is a preternaturally festive brilliance set off by a central, swaggeringly sinister turn to the minor, octave salvos, an elaborately glittering cadenza, and a return to the major in which the theme is unfurled in aerial scintillations. Unfortunately, a perfunctory coda is several notches in inspiration below the torso it rounds off, prompting Busoni—another notable "appropriator"—to compose a glittering peroration recalling Liszt at the top of his bent. For all the discussion of Chopin, Liszt's sudden interest in the polonaise likely owed to his recently acquired mistress, the Polish Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein.

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Both written in 1851, Franz Liszt's Polonaises are true to the elegant and stately style of Polish and Hungarian dances which inspired them. The influence of Chopin can be heard in both of these pieces which show Liszt' s compositional style at its most brilliant.

The first polonaise is lovely, dark, and dramatic, and carries an unusual mixture of Hungarian and Polish flavor. Written in C minor, it is an almost rhapsodic series of variations on a theme, each evoking a distinctly different mood. A second theme is expressed in a warmly romantic fashion but is overtaken by the original melodic line as it is restated in a stormily stark octave passage which suddenly gives way to a quietly mysterious section in 4/4 time. This section has the feeling of a cadenza with delicate running figures in the right hand. When the second theme reappears, it creates a brief feeling of optimism but is generally weighed down by the brooding mood of the piece. The final measures offer a hopeful strain with a shift from minor to major modes and brings this work to a satisfying close.

The second polonaise is a complete contrast to the first; awash with brilliance and vitality. The pulsing chordal pattern of the left hand in the opening section of this piece gives a feeling of forward motion which seems to push the melody along. The second section is marked patetico, shifts the key to A minor, and offers a melodic theme that is reminiscent of the brooding mood of the first polonaise. This leads to a cadenza which reintroduces the original theme with an impressive series of scintillating runs and trills. Coming to a triumphant climax, the two melodic lines join to bring this work to a brilliant and powerful conclusion.

Stately and lyrical in keeping with the polonaise form, these two works, especially in tandem, are an exquisite example of Liszt's exuberant and romantic compositional style and should be part of the repertoire of any accomplished pianist.

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