Les Preludes

Franz Liszt was a long-lived Jimi Hendrix of the 19th century, a virtuoso of the piano instead of the six-string. Tinkling them ivory bones he made the ladies swoon and the men all want to be him. Then, as he lived past age 27, that temporal speedbump that proved too much for our Hendrix to handle, he matured as a composer. Nothing groundbreaking and genre-bending as, say, a Beethoven, Wagner and a Mahler, but he wrote for the masses. And the masses loved him.

Disappointed and disenchanted after six or seven years listening solely to grunge, I needed to cleanse the palate. Alice in Chains will do that to you. So I opted for as radical a shift as possible, not just 180 degrees, but 180 degrees into another spatial dimension. From the late-90s to somewhere in the mid-2000s, all I listened to was Classical Music. Capital C, capital M.

One of the first pieces of music to hook me was Liszt’s Les Preludes. Here, take a listen, and see if it grabs you, too.

Now, for the longest time, I had a hankering to play the main theme, the “Grand Theme” or “Majestic Theme” as it’s sometimes called, from Les Preludes with a full, modern, rock band. That’s the part you can hear at 2:33 and repeating at 14:54 in the above video. Don’t you think that would be neat? I’ve heard bands play Wagner, like Ride of the Valkyries, or Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King (The Who did that, I believe), but I always thought this would be the tune to play.

Well, I heard Les Preludes at work a few days ago so I googled the music. Surprisingly difficult to find. But find it I did. At least, the chords for the Grand Theme. They are:

C – F!

F – Bb!

G – C!

Ab – F – C!

Ab – F – C!

But that didn’t sound quite right on my acoustic guitar. So I shifted everything down a step-and-a-half, and this resulted:

A – D!

D – G!

E – A!

F – D – A!

F – D – A!

Sounds awesome. Look at me, I still have goose bumps writing this.

Next: figure out the melodic runs up and down over the above mentioned chords …

To Be Continued …