About this edition
Franz Liszt's Christus, S.3, is the towering achievement of his sacred music: an oratorio of roughly three hours in fourteen movements, scored for vocal soloists, chorus, organ, and orchestra, that follows the life of Christ across three great panels — the Christmas Oratorio, After Epiphany, and Passion and Resurrection. Setting Latin texts drawn from scripture, the Catholic liturgy, and medieval hymnody, Liszt fuses Gregorian chant, Renaissance-style counterpoint, and his own visionary harmony into a work of extraordinary spiritual and structural breadth. It holds some of his most beloved pages, including the orchestral "March of the Three Holy Kings," and received its complete premiere under the composer's own direction in Weimar in 1873.
This volume reproduces the first edition full score published by Schuberth & Co. in Leipzig, issued without a printed date but generally assigned to 1872 and carrying engraving plate number 4934. The house of Julius Schuberth ranked among the leading German music publishers of the nineteenth century, and it brought this score out in the period surrounding the first complete performance. It was through this edition that Christus first reached conductors and choral societies, and it remains the foundational printed source for the oratorio, preserving Liszt's text underlay, tempo markings, and orchestration as they were first presented to the public.
About this edition:
- Complete full orchestral score, all three parts and fourteen movements
- Page size: 8.5 x 11 inches
- Reproduced from a public domain source
- Publisher: Purple 4R Publishing
This edition brings a public domain historical score back into print in a clean, affordable format. We are glad to help conductors, singers, students, and scholars keep this remarkable work close at hand, on the shelf and on the music stand.
