LDV90

Lyapunov’s Études are still little-known today, as is his musical output in general, including the piano music that accounts for the majority of it. Aside from their formidable difficulty, do you see any particular reason for this? Could it be because they are something of an isolated phenomenon in the history of the piano, like Albéniz’s Iberia , for example, composed just after them? Though we shouldn’t forget that Busoni and Horowitz frequently played them in their day. I still remember the mixture of enthusiasm, incomprehension and revolt I felt when I discovered Lyapunov’s Études at the age of fourteen: how could music so beautiful, so finely written for the virtuoso and so accessible to the music lover, be so little known? No doubt Lyapunov, like many others, has been the victim of a certain conception of musical history that celebrates above all else inventions, innovations, technical revolutions, works that change the course of that history. For those who adhere to such a conception, Lyapunov’s works, in effect, do not exist. But the music lover, the enthusiast who, without worrying about context or chronology, discovers these works simply for what they are, for the beauty they exalt, cannot explain their disappearance other than by that ‘dreary lack of curiosity’ ( morne incuriosité , as Baudelaire puts it) which, instead of celebrating the immense diversity of our piano repertory, has ended up reducing it to twenty or so composers – whose genius is not in question, but who are the only ones we ever get a chance of hearing in concert today. FLORIAN NOACK 15