The signature on a musical score claims it, but that claim is not straightforward. This book will examine its nature and status in relation to the Etudes d'exécution transcendante by Liszt. It will further ask just what kind of musical work this is, how it relates to its two earlier versions, and even how we might begin to make judgements about it. The Transcendentals had a pre-history, well known in general outline. Liszt's youthful Etude en douze exercices was reworked as his Douze Grandes Etudes and they in turn were reworked as the Etudes d'exécution transcendante. The three sets of etudes, together with the symphonic poem Mazeppa, based on the fourth etude, make up the body of music addressed by this book. Naturally one of my aims is to examine the music itself. Perhaps the ‘naturally’ can no longer be taken for granted. Music analysis, the discipline where the specificity of music is most obviously celebrated, has been challenged by several, now-familiar anti-essentialist critiques: that closed concepts of a work, involving such notions as structure, unity, wholeness and complexity, need to be replaced by open concepts whose defining criteria are neither precise nor complete; that what we analyse is a schematic structure which is bound to remain less than its realisation as a work; that the work anyway is collectively authored; that its identity is unstable, shaped anew in multiple receptions. These critiques were salutary.