Freie Bearbeitungen VII (II/7)

Series II of the New Liszt Edition contains Liszt's free arrangements and transcriptions for the piano. Apart from one Beethoven transcription, Volume 7 contains only piano pieces based on works by Schubert. Throughout his life, Liszt respected and admired the art of Schubert, and was partial to arranging his compositions for piano, even when the Austrian composer was hardly known.

This volume includes the arrangements made in 1844-46, the majority of which are piano versions of songs, and the three marches closing the volume are based on four-hand works by Schubert. It should be noted that the song Lebe wohl! was misleadingly published under Schubert's name several times, and the composer was in actual fact not Schubert but August Heinrich von Weyrauch. Liszt could not have known this when he composed it, so this too features in the cycle 6 mélodies célebres de François Schubert.

As customary, there are two versions of the publication: a blue clothbound edition and a grey softcover edition. The informative preface giving the most important information on the contents and technical details is identical in both versions, but only the former version includes an English description of the sources and a critical commentary. Both versions include facsimiles of pages of Liszt's original autograph manuscript.