Sophie Menter she became professor of piano at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory but left in 1886 to continue concertizing. Because of her popularity, Menter succeeded with music that no other pianist would touch. This included Liszt's First Piano Concerto, which she played in Vienna in 1869, 12 years after its disastrous premiere there. One of her recital specialties was a piece entitled "Rhapsodies". This was a composite of three of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies—Nos. 2, 6 and 12—along with fragments from several others. She also composed various pieces for piano, mainly in a brilliant style, yet referred to her own compositional talent as
Romanian Rhapsodies (Enescu) Enescu maintained this order of performance throughout his life. The Rhapsody No. 1 in A major is dedicated to the composer and pedagogue (a fellow student with Enescu in André Gedalge's counterpoint class at the Conservatoire), and is the better known of the two rhapsodies. The essence of this rhapsody is the dance. Enescu claimed that it was "just a few tunes thrown together without thinking about it", but his surviving sketches show that he carefully worked out the order in which the melodies should appear, and the best instrumental setting for each one. It was completed on 14 August