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Personal recollections, unreferenced
Today, I removed the following, apparently personal, reminiscences from this article. If anyone can find a source it would be welcome, since it is relevant (but should not appear in this form in the article):
"For over a hundred years, this piece was known and performed as a work of the German pianist Sophie Menter (1846-1918). Born in Munich, Menter was one of Liszt’s best pupils, and studied with him in Weimar from 1869. She subsequently taught at the St. Petersburg Conservatory in Russia between 1883 and 1887, where she became friendly with Tchaikovsky. Liszt described her as “the greatest pianist of her day” and his “only legitimate daughter as a pianist”. She was at his bedside when he died in Bayreuth in 1886.
Sophie Menter had another very close friend, also a pupil of Liszt, named Vera Timanoff, who died in 1941. It was to Vera that she confided (who then told the eminent Liszt scholar Professor Milstein, who then told my French friend Roch Serra, who, in turn, told me) that the Sophie Menter Concerto was, in reality, a piece composed for her by Liszt. After her move to Russia, it is alleged, she asked Tchaikovsky if he would provide an orchestral accompaniment for ‘her’ piece. Presumably she did not dare tell him that it was Liszt who had actually composed the work. Why? Perhaps because she knew Tchaikovsky loathed Liszt (“his music leaves me completely cold”, he once wrote) and it was well-known that he was not at all pleased with Liszt’s piano transcription of his Polonaise from the opera Eugene Onegin. Tchaikovsky, however, graciously complied with Menter’s request and for many years the piece was known as the Menter-Tchaikovsky Concerto, the whole truth being revealed only very recently.
The piano part, if possible, has almost more Hungarian flavour than any other piece by Liszt. It is wonderfully rhapsodic, full of wild czardases and cimbalom effects, whirling gypsy melodies and rhythms, all of which accelerate in a breathless, thrilling race to the finish. While Tchaikovsky’s orchestral accompaniment is magically inspired and expertly woven into the fabric of the piece, it also gives the concerto an unmistakable ‘Russian’ quirkiness, which merely adds to the work’s charm and good spirits."
