Late works of Franz Liszt to Saint-Saëns. The three czárdás that Liszt wrote—titled "Czárdás", "Czárdás obstinée" and "Czárdás macabre"—are less freely treated than the Hungarian Rhapsodies and remain more specifically Hungarian than gypsy in thematic material. Their spare lines, angular rhythms and advanced harmonies show these pieces to be direct ancestors of Bartók's work. Because of these attributes, the czárdás are considered by Liszt scholars among the more interesting of the composer's late output. The same, some critics argue, cannot be said as uniformly about his Hungarian Rhapsodies 16-19, composed after he had neglected the genre 30 years. Of these four late rhapsodies, only the
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