By Grizzle Quickquill, Senior Culture & Entheogenic Liabilities Correspondent
GNN Desk, Sub-Basement 4B — In the interest of rigorous cultural journalism—and because Fizzle Sludgepocket locked the breakroom fridge after someone stole his labeled yogurt—the GNN Culture Desk spent Saturday night drinking two thermoses of grey, tree-bark sludge brewed by a guy behind the Titusville Greyhound station and listening to Franz Liszt’s complete Transcendental Études (S.139) back-to-back.
Liszt wrote these twelve exercises in 1852 specifically to break the human hand. Combined with hefty doses of Banisteriopsis caapi, they also break the human ego, your concept of linear time, and a $14 IKEA floor lamp.
Image credit: GoblinLife Vault
Here is the definitive breakdown of the ordeal:
Études No. 1 (Preludio) through No. 3 (Paysage)
00:00 – 00:12 | The Purge & The Pastoral Preludio lasts less than a minute, which was barely enough time for the alkaloids to hit the lower intestine. By the time the F major arpeggios of Paysage rolled in, the drywall in the GNN audio booth began breathing like a bellows. Liszt intended No. 3 to evoke a peaceful countryside landscape; on ayahuasca, it sounds like being digested by a very polite, mathematically precise meadow. I vomited into an empty wastebasket directly on the downbeat of measure 42. Impeccable phrasing.
Étude No. 4 (Mazeppa)
00:13 – 00:21 | Equine Ego Death Inspired by Victor Hugo’s poem about a guy strapped naked to a wild horse running through the Ukrainian steppe. This is where the machine elves showed up, and it turns out they are all 19th-century Austro-Hungarian piano instructors with rulers. Every rapid-fire double octave in the left hand physically pelted my frontal lobe like gravel. Halfway through the Allegro deciso, I became convinced I was the Steinway Model D, and that Lazar Berman was personally hammering my ribs with felt mallets because I lied on my 2024 tax return.
Étude No. 5 (Feux follets)
00:22 – 00:26 | The Chromatic Spiders "Will-o'-the-wisps." In sober reality, this is a terrifyingly delicate test of alternating double notes in the right hand. In the depths of the brew, those chromatic runs manifested as thousands of translucent, bioluminescent spiders crawling out of the studio monitors to reorganize my childhood memories by BPM. If you miss a sixteenth note here, the jungle spirits audit your soul.
Études No. 8 (Wilde Jagd) & No. 10 (Appassionata)
00:38 – 00:50 | The Fractal Hunt Time collapsed entirely during the F minor fury of Appassionata. The relentless, galloping rhythms of Wilde Jagd ("Wild Hunt") triggered a full-scale ancestral hallucination in which the ghost of Franz Liszt—rendered entirely in glowing green wireframe geometry—descended from the acoustic ceiling tiles to demand why I hadn't practiced my scales since the third grade. He had fourteen fingers on each hand and smelled like ozone and cheap clove cigarettes.
Étude No. 12 (Chasse-neige)
00:56 – 01:03 | The Whiteout "Snow-plough" or "Blizzard." Continuous, swelling tremolos and sweeping chromatic scales that imitate a fatal Alpine snowstorm. By minute four, the physical room was gone, replaced by an infinite, blindingly white void of thirty-second notes. My nervous system dissolved into pure sustain-pedal resonance. When the final B-flat minor chord died out, I woke up on the linoleum floor clutching a MIDI cable like a rosary, weeping over the sheer, arrogant audacity of Romantic-era virtuosity.
THE VERDICT
A harrowing, technically overwhelming masterclass in Romantic piano literature that really makes you feel like a Victorian nobleman dying of consumption in a sacred Amazonian cenote. It has a little something for everyone—provided "everyone" includes masochistic concert pianists and goblins undergoing forced spiritual alignment in a windowless server room.
SCORE: 9.5 / 10 (Docked 0.5 points because the ghost of Czerny still owes me twenty bucks).
