â...an artist, a man who will create a life in music, find listeners, and reward them.â â The Boston Globe

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Related styles: Classical: Piano solo, Classical: Romantic Era, Type: Instrumental

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The Hungarian composer Franz Liszt transcribed other composerâs works as part of his typically fiery and multifarious self-investigations. In varied guises and identities, Liszt penetrated the music of his great predecessors, usually showing more love than respect. Sometimes he adulated his musical forebears, but other transcriptions sound like attempts to supersede or improve upon past composers.

Bach/Liszt Prelude and Fugue in A minor S. 462

For Liszt, whose religious obsessions dated to his childhood and would eventually lead to his taking minor orders as an abbé in 1865, Bach was the quintessence of spirituality in music. Writing in 1852 to the composer Peter Cornelius (1824-1874), Liszt advised: âYou need only assimilate Palestrina and Bach â then let your heart speak, and youâll be able to say with the Prophet, âI speak, for I believe; and I know that our God liveth eternally.ââ Appropriately
faithful are Lisztâs quite literal transcriptions of Bachâs Six Preludes and Fugues for Organ, which he worked on from 1842 to 1850, to which the Prelude and Fugue in A minor heard here belongs. Transferring the pedal parts to the pianistâs hands, these transcriptions allow the voice of Bach to speak in the concert hall, in a concentrated miniaturization of the mighty organ blasts of Bachâs âGreatâ Prelude and Fugue in A minor BWV 543.

Liszt Grandes études de Paganini S. 141 (1851)

When the famed Italian violinist Niccolò Paganini (1782-1840) died, Liszt published an equivocal article chastising Paganini for assuming a âvain and egoistic roleâ with âegoistic pleasures and sterile renown.â Liszt urged future musicians to use âvirtuosity as a means and not an end, and to always recall that as much as, and more than, nobility, GENIUS HAS ITS OBLIGATIONS.â By contrast, after first hearing Paganini a decade earlier, Liszt was ecstatically admiring, enthusing to friends about the violinistâs transcendent virtuosity (which some listeners ascribed to the devil). Starting in 1832, Liszt began his Etudes dâexécution transcendante dâaprès Paganini S. 140 (Transcendental Etudes after Paganini), published from 1838 to 1840, and later revised as the identically structured Grandes études de Paganini S. 141, published in 1851. These are based on Paganiniâs 24 Caprices for solo violin and in the case of Etude No. 3 in G-sharp minor (La Campanella) on Paganiniâs Violin Concerto No. 2 in B minor. Lisztâs La Campanella (the handbell) may owe some of its special audience popularity to the fact that a piano evokes a bell more percussively than a violin can, while its fervent dance-like melodies exemplify Italianate vigour. Etude No. 1 in G minor (marked Preludio, non troppo lento and dubbed âTrémoloâ) is perhaps the most swaggeringly Hungarian-sounding of the group. Etude No. 2 in E-flat major (marked Andantino capriccioso) uses rapid scales and octaves to depict a whimsical, seductive personality, while the technical challenges of Etude No. 4 in E major (marked Vivo; and known as âArpeggioâ) are particularly daunting. Etude No. 5 in E major (subtitled âLa Chasseâ), despite its hearty evocation of hunting horns and galloping horses, retains elfin elegance. The final piece of the group, Etude No. 6 in A minor (subtitled âThème et variationsâ), captures all the athletic, glitzy exhibitionism of Paganiniâs 24th violin Caprice.

Beethoven/Liszt Adelaïde S. 466

No such glitz is aspired to in Lisztâs three transcriptions â from 1839 to 1847 â of Beethovenâs song Adelaïde, of which the last (1847) is performed here. Liszt ranked Beethoven among the worldâs cultural treasures, listing him in an 1832 letter to a friend alongside such other obsessions as âHomer, the Bible, Plato, Locke, Byron, Hugo, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Bach, Hummel, Mozart, and Weber.â Liszt even invented a story, later discounted by biographers, that in Vienna in 1823, Beethoven supposedly heard the boy Liszt perform and gave him a âkiss of consecrationâ (Weihekuss). By 1838, Liszt had transcribed Beethovenâs Symphonies No. 5, 6 and 7 for piano and, in an 1839 letter to his publisher Breitkopf & Härtel, further offered to transcribe some Beethoven songs. Adelaïde by Beethoven (1795-1796), an idealistic lament about an unattainable beauty, was one of the first which he tackled. For Liszt, as he wrote in an 1852 letter, Beethoven produced âreligious exaltationâ with his works, which are like the âpillar of cloud and fire which guided the Israelites through the desertâ¦so that we may progress both day and night.â Liszt duly lavished tender devotion on Beethovenâs relatively minor, although beloved, Adelaïde.

Mozart/Liszt Réminiscences de Don Juan S. 418

The Italian composer and pianist Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924) prefaced his edition of Lisztâs 1841 Réminiscences de Don Juan (Don Juan Fantasy) with the caveat that âstrict puristsâ might consider that the work, inspired by Mozartâs opera Don Giovanni, âtreats of holy matters in an all-too-worldly manner.â For Liszt, Mozart was no sacred cow. In an 1852 letter, Liszt gently mocks Alexandre Oulibichev, a Russian-born, French-language author for describing Mozart in a 1843 biography as a âsort of Dalai Lama.â Instead of inviolable adulation, Réminiscences de Don Juan, like Lisztâs other transcriptions from 1841, Réminiscences de Norma (Bellini) and Réminiscences de Robert le Diable: Valse infernale (Meyerbeer), present galvanizing operatic characters as largerthan-life beings. Widely seen as a great lover himself, Liszt offers a kind of self-portrait in the Réminiscences de Don Juan, despite his usual real-life passivity in response to female adulation. The work ends exuberantly with Don Giovanniâs manic ode to self-indulgence, the âChampagne aria,â unlike Mozartâs opera which concludes punitively with the Donâs descent to Hell. When Liszt performed Réminiscences de Don Juan, he reportedly adopted different facial expressions to incarnate Don Giovanni and the peasant girl Zerlina in the seductive duo Là ci darem la mano, revealing his deep dramatic identification with the opera. Like Beethoven and Bach, Mozart was a living presence in Lisztâs workaday world, not a mere icon to be respected from afar.

© 2008 Benjamin Ivry
Benjamin Ivry is author of biographies of Ravel, Poulenc and Rimbaud and translator from French of authors such as Gide, Verne and Balthus