Piano Concerto No. 2 (Liszt)
concerto for piano and orchestra by Franz Liszt
Franz Liszt wrote drafts for his Piano Concerto No. 2 in A major, S.125, during his virtuoso period, in 1839 to 1840. He then put away the manuscript for a decade. When he returned to the concerto, he revised and scrutinized it repeatedly. The fourth and final period of revision ended in 1861. Liszt dedicated the work to his student Hans von Bronsart, who gave the first performance, with Liszt conducting, in Weimar on January 7, 1857.
A typical performance of this concerto lasts about 25 minutes.
Instrumentation
The concerto is scored for solo piano, three flutes (one doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets in A, two bassoons, two horns in E, two trumpets in E, three trombones (two tenor, one bass), tuba, timpani in D and A, cymbals and strings.
Form
This concerto is one single, long movement, divided into six sections that are connected by transformations of several themes:
Adagio sostenuto assai
The key musical idea of this concerto is first heard in the first clarinet, accompanied by no more than four other woodwinds: a sequence of two chords—an A major chord with a C♯ on top, then a dominant seventh on F♮. One note connects the two chords—an A.
Allegro agitato assai
This is technically the scherzo of the piece.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q210212. VIAF identifies the subject as 292966965. The Library of Congress control number is nr95036210. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1839, 1840, 1861 and 1857.
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This entry incorporates text from “Piano Concerto No. 2 (Liszt)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.