Liszt - Trois morceaux suisses, S156a (Dubé)

The Trois morceaux suisses are the revisions of the three Paraphrases which formed the third book of the original Album d’un voyageur. The first piece, based on Swiss composer Ferdinand Huber’s version of the cowherds’ traditional Ranz de vaches (there is simply no cognate for ‘ranz’ in English: it is the generic title of the melodies improvised by Swiss herdsmen—whether of cows, as in this piece, or of goats, as in the third—played on the alpenhorn or sung), is a series of free variations on the theme hear