NEATLY ARRANGED
The genius of Liszt transcriptions
THE TRANSCRIPTIONS ON Imogen Cooper’s new CD are the tip of a large musical iceberg. Over the centuries, transcriptions have fulfilled many roles. Bach’s of Vivaldi – eg, his version for four keyboards of a Vivaldi concerto for four violins – gave him a chance to explore the Italian’s work from the inside, and brought it to a new audience in a new form. Certain sets of variations by Mozart and Beethoven were a form of transcription and elaboration – for instance, Beethoven’s on ‘Bei männern’ from Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte for cello and piano.
Liszt, though, went further, with transcriptions that took many forms and served a multitude of purposes. His concert fantasias on themes from operas such as Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, Weber’s Der Freischütz and others were fantastical expoundings that provided him and his adoring audiences with virtuoso razzle-dazzle on familiar melodies, yet also brought that music to some who had not heard it before.
In his concentrated transcriptions of Lieder by Schubert and Schumann, he effectively became a one-man broadcast channel, popularising these little-known masterpieces and putting technical whirligigs firmly at the service of the music.
Liszt’s approach to Wagner, though, eschewed extraneous fuss. In such transcriptions as the Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde and some selections from Parsifal, he sought to capture on the piano an equivalent sonority to that of the orchestra: this feat relies first on his own unrivalled capacity to arrange the notes and their overtones to create a threedimensional impression, and secondly on the pianist’s ability to layer and project that range of sound-colour. This was also his approach to making transcriptions of Beethoven’s symphonies, his own Faust Symphony and myriad others.