Alfred Grünfeld (1852-1924): Wagner-Liszt - Liebestod

Grünfeld was the first great pianist to make any kind of commercial recordings, which he commenced in 1899. He left recordings of works by Bach, Chopin, Schumann, Grieg, Debussy, Liszt, Brahms and others; but Grünfeld was known primarily as a provider of light entertainment music in Vienna, and his arrangements of Strauss's music are his most famous and enduring legacy. His expertise at performance of other more serious music is not widely appreciated: even in his own time he was deprecated as not being a performer of "serious" music. Only those who knew him best wrote of his great skill at performing the music for which he was not generally well known. He was in fact the foremost pianist in Vienna in the later 1800s and into the early 20th century. Here I hope a few recordings may convince that this was a very fine pianist indeed, fully expressing many 19th century techniques (eg. the rubato and non-synchronisation of the hands) and expressive attitudes to the music. This is a recording of a sort of work not usually associated with Grünfeld (wrongly when one looks at concert programmes however, which feature late Beethoven as well as other serious music). It is the Liebestod from Wagner's opera Tristan and Isolde, as arranged by Liszt. The recording was made in 1909. It is doubly interesting as it is a way to hear any sort of nineteenth-century approach to performance of Wagner at his most intense.