by Franz Liszt
A song Liszt rewrote for the piano, on a poem telling you to love while you still can.
Liszt published the three Liebesträume — dreams of love — in 1850, and they are not original piano pieces: each is his own arrangement of a song he had already written. The third, on a poem by Ferdinand Freiligrath, is the one everybody means. The poem’s advice is blunt: love as long as you are able, because the hour will come when you stand at graves and mourn. Liszt subtitled all three Notturno, placing them in the same tradition as Chopin’s nocturnes.
The melody appears three times in A♭ major, each statement richer than the last, floating over broken chords that both hands share. Between the statements Liszt writes two cadenzas — fast, barely measured chromatic runs that pull the key sideways before the tune returns. It ends about as quietly as it began.
Liszt’s own transcription of his song “O lieb, so lang du lieben kannst”.
This is an advanced piece, and the reason is the hand-sharing. The melody is rarely where you would expect it: it moves between thumbs, from one hand to the other, sometimes mid-phrase, while the arpeggios continue around it. That makes finding a fingering which lets the tune sing while everything else stays quiet a decision on nearly every beat. Add wide reaches, a texture that grows to four real voices, and two cadenzas that have to sound free and still land in time.
Practise it in slow motion, one hand at a time, for longer than feels reasonable. Learning where the melody hands over is most of the work, and it is far easier to see when the tempo is halved and you are only playing one hand.
No levelled arrangement for this one yet — you play the score as it stands, with the app's tempo control, wait mode and one-hand practice to get you there. Levelled arrangements are added a curated batch at a time. See the Library
