Afanassiev

Lu par Marina Foïs et Thierry Lhermitte
Si nous connaissons tous les contes des frères Grimm, d'Andersen, ou d'Afanassiev, combien d'entre nous ont-ils eu la chance d'entendre ou de lire leurs équivalents espagnols, roumains, anglais ou finlandais ? La fin du dix-neuvième siècle voit pourtant un mouvement de redécouverte des trésors de l'oralité sans équivalent dans l'histoire européenne, amenant de multiples recueils d'une valeur et d'un intérêt souvent équivalents à ceux de leurs illustres contemporains. …

"You can freely paraphrase Louis XIV and say: I am the orchestra! I am the cho¬rus! I am also the conductor!” With these words Hector Berlioz paid homage to a man who was indeed all of these things put together: Franz Liszt.
This eulogy, however, was not only for Liszt, the man; it was also for his instrument and the compositions he wrote for it, an instrument which, also in part thanks to Liszt, became the dominant instrument of bourgeois musical culture in the 19th century: the piano. The reason for this dominance? Liszt himself gave the answer by ascribing to the piano and to the ten fingers of the pianist the ability to reproduce the sonorities and harmonies of an entire orchestra. The improvements made to the piano at that time (around 1825), e.g. the new Erard repetition action and the exponsion of the instrument's range to seven octaves, support these claims.