The great Liszt scholar Maria Eckhardt has expounded at length
and with great lucidity the complicated relationship between
Liszt and the theme of the Rákóczi March in her exemplary study
Liszt’s Music Manuscripts in the National Széchenyi Library , to
which the reader is earnestly commended. For our present
purposes suffice it to say that of all Liszt’s complete
surviving versions of this work there are no fewer than seven
for piano. The present version, the first to survive, was not
printed at the time of its composition because of Austrian
censorship, and was first printed with an article by Dr Eckhardt
in 1975 and appeared in Vol I/18 of the splendid Neue Liszt-
Ausgabe ten years later. The version, harmonically and
texturally quite different from all the others (compare, for
example, the well-known Fifteenth Hungarian Rhapsody), created a
sensation when Liszt first toured with it in Hungary in 1839/40.
from notes by Leslie Howard © 1994