I was in high school when I first made my way through Liszt's "Don Juan" Fantasy. It had to be high school because that was the last time I ever wrote fingerings or anything else onto a printed score.
I had heard a quote, attributed to Rudolph Serkin, in which students were admonished not to write on their scores. "If you want to remember it, you will remember it" was the substance of the quote, and whether Serkin himself actually said it or not it made a quick and lasting impression on me. I remember a similar comment attributed to Glenn Gould. I never wrote on a score again, considering it a form of frivolous defilement, though I made exceptions for chamber music and ensemble parts.
It is amusing to me to see my hand-written notes on this Liszt fantasy. Such earnestness and industry as I unravel this impenetrable code!
These descending chromatic-third fingerings look pretty good to me. Chromatic thirds were a special fascination of mine, and as insurmountable as they seemed to me in the 11th grade I remember feeling like I was lifting a mountain when the "Don Juan" took thirds to a new level of obtuseness: chromatic thirds in the left hand! I had never seen this before, and was relieved that this only happened once.
You could say it happened twice, though this second instance is not as severe, as it is part of an alternating-hands passage of thirds which I suppose you could fake by using both hands throughout:
(There is, now that I double-check myself, another thirds passage for the left hand in this fantasy, but it is in the "Alternate version of the transition to the Presto" which I never learned.)
This concert fantasy held a special fascination for me from my first awareness. At one of my first piano lessons in the 4th Grade I remember my teacher saying that some piano music was so difficult that it was virtually impossible to read. Sitting at the piano with some of these scores, she said, required work, and she compared it to untying a mass of complicated knots. She may have been referring to the "Don Juan" Fantasy, or to other of the opera transcriptions by Liszt and his contemporaries.
I never took this piece to a piano lesson, but I remember playing this thing from start to finish, and today I find that the stuff still sits pretty well in my hands. I do not like to listen to this piece but it is seductive to play. The writing for the instrument is so masterful.
Look at me, I even made a correction! The left hand half of this chromatic flourish was tagged as having 37 notes, but careful counting found only 36, thus eliminating the 37-against-36 polyrhythm. Phew!
