«An improvised introduction was, for hundreds of years, a sign of musical good manners and a chance for the player to frame appropriately the pieces in his program. It was also an opportunity to give the audience a gentle reminder that the player too was a creative artist» [Hamilton 2008, 101]. Liszt not only wrote a whole piece entitled Preludio with the tempo indication «presto» (S139/1) but also a draft (S164c), possibly in a book of memoirs (due to the pink colour of the paper), that is first published and commented on here.
The analysis of the document shows Liszt’s pleasure for linguistic experiments in an epoch (1840) in which he seems just interested in winning fame as a virtuoso piano player. There is a particular use of descending diminished seventh chords, that realises the total chromatic series, and a particular melodic sequence in the bass voice that introduces a cadence in F# Major.
The author of this article tries to guess from the morphology of the little Preludio its possible connection with other more important pieces, in which the same harmonic devices (diminished sevenths, chromatic gamut, non-diatonic scale) are present. The analysis shows interesting links between this little Preludio and some passages in the Dante Sonata (first version as Paralipomènes) and in the Faust Symphony. Moreover the author maintains that the same “improvised” music may have introduced the third piece of Venezia e Napoli during one of the concerts of the tournée in England.