Franz Liszt: 'Ab Irato' (Grand Etude de Perfectionnement), S.143

“Liszt: Ab irato” by Valse Mélancolique
The hand crossing in the start is weird possibly for visual effect while performing to look more demonic and I looked at the manuscript for this piece it seems he wrote it in haste like scribbles during class maybe as some encore its all there complete along with a short ossia passage I cut out of the video to make the lines fit better. I'm not sure whey he gave it that sub-title - seems like a Publisher's idea because pieces needed more than one descriptor back in the day to tell if something was a waltz, sonata, etude, caprice because the public was no longer interested in ancient dances put into long exhaustive suites unless it is put to vocals that screech louder than some exotic birds paired with costumes that put our Halloween traditions to shame... so this is not just an 'Etude' it is Grand... for Perfection, and has a descriptor which means "by One who is Angry" The ending theme of beauty is so brief and you only hear it once he definitely did that on purpose... again a flashy extrovert acrobat which complements the unergonomic hand-crossings in the start and something finally different than 6/8 tympani-boom-boom with gross snare-rattle-chords basically modulating around aimlessly before he throws in a large arpeggio followed by more of the same thing followed by a thankfully short octave passage. The next section is as dry as early-Beethoven and a little thoughtless I think there are some errors in the Editions with the bass notes but it doesn't really matter especially on an old muddy piano when this thing was written you can barely hear the pitches over all the bombastic octaves that are going on. The only thing we can relate to is the middle-singing-tenor-treble voices - I recommend trying to play an old piano because not only are all the sounds different, the keys are usually non uniform sizes making you have to change fingerings.