Originally a poem written by Thomas Moore in 1805, "The Last Rose of Summer" is based upon the Irish traditional tune of "Aislean an Oigfear", or "The Young Man's Dream."



Sigismond Thalberg was one of the most famous and most successful piano composers of the 19th century. During the 1830s and the 1840s his style was a major force in European piano-playing.[57] He was greatly in fashion and was imitated by others.[58] In 1852, Wilhelm von Lenz wrote:

'The piano playing of the present day, to tell the truth, consists only of Thalberg simple, Thalberg amended, and Thalberg exaggerated; scratch what is written for the piano, and you will find Thalberg.'

Ten years later, in 1862, a London correspondent of the Revue et gazette musicale wrote:

'Nobody in fact has been so much imitated; his manner has been parodied, exaggerated, twisted, tortured, and it may have happened more than once to all of us to curse this Thalbergian school'.
Expressions like "exaggerated", "twisted" and "tortured" indicate that some contemporaries were starting to feel jaded of his style. It was at this time when Thalberg's career as composer and as virtuoso came to an end.

In the late 19th century, Thalberg's fame had come to depend on his association with a single piano technique, the 'three-hand effect'. Carl Friedrich Weitzmann, in his Geschichte des Klavierspiels (1879), wrote about this.

'His bravura pieces, fantasies on melodies from Rossini's Mosè and La donna del lago, on motifs from Bellini's Norma and on Russian folk-songs, became extraordinarily popular through his own, brilliant execution; however, they treat their subjects always in one and the same way, [namely] ... to let the tones of a melody be played in the medium octave of the keyboard now by the thumb of the right, now of the left hand, while the rest of the fingers are executing arpeggios filling the whole range of the keyboard.'

This is a collection of piano solos written in June and July of 2023 and written exactly as played in the August 2023 piano album, "Last Dreams of Summer," as heard on streaming platforms around the world. The YouTube video is of the last song on the album and an arrangement of the beloved Irish melody, "'Tis the Last Rose of Summer." The MP3 demonstration performance is of the first song, "When Sunsets Paint the Skies." James Michael Stevens is a prolific composer residing in Nashville, TN and the music dean of Welch College.