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THE SCHUBERT SONG TRANSCRIPTIONS for Solo Piano
By Franz Liszt Dover Publications, Inc.
Copyright © 1995 Dover Publications, Inc.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-486-17143-2
CHAPTER 1
LISZT'S SCHUBERT LIEDER TRANSCRIPTIONS
Liszt's initial foray into the transcription of music from one medium to another came in the mid-1830s with his work on the Schubert songs. Both from his artistic viewpoint and the less enlightened interests of his publishers, the venture was an immediate success. Even this early in Liszt's career, his transcriptions were, without question, extremely lucrative for his publishers, who hounded him for as many such works as he could produce. In an 1839 letter to Breitkopf, Liszt remarked that "The good Haslinger inundates me with Schubert. I have just sent him 24 new Lieder (Schwanengesang and Winterreise), and for the moment I feel somewhat fatigued with this labor."
Of course, the art of transcription was not new with Liszt. What set him apart from his contemporary pianist-transcribers was his faithfulness to the original works, especially in the case of Schubert. Contrary to the given opinion, he disliked the arrangements of his virtuoso contemporaries—such as the pianist (and sometimes adversary) Kalkbrenner—because they had too many flourishes that detracted from the music, a charge that was made against Liszt as well early in his career. But Liszt ensured that his own editions would not be accused of that fault. Throughout the transcription process, he upheld the integrity of the original composer's work. In the case of the Schubert songs, Liszt took the pre-existing distinctive song accompaniments and transformed them according to his own fabulous technique. Moreover, when these song transcriptions were published, he initially objected when the original texts were printed at the beginning of each work, preferring that the words be placed appropriately throughout the score. While some publishers accommodated him (some issues of the Diabelli editions do contain underlaid texts), most found this an expensive and time-consuming procedure and printed the texts entiers at the beginning of each song. Liszt saw his work with Schubert in very much the same way Mendelssohn and Schumann did their work on Bach: Liszt was intent on bringing the then relatively unknown Schubert lieder into the mainstream of nineteenth-century concert repertory, as a solo performer and with fresh concert fare, alone on the stage—as Liszt put it to the Princess Cristina Belgiojoso, paraphrasing King Louis XIV, "Le concert, c'st moi!"
There is no question that Liszt took pride in the genre he helped to create, and to some extent he wished to be remembered as the composer/performer who gave the genre its unique quality. In the dedication copy of the first volume of Ramann's biography, at the foot of the page containing a discussion of his transcription of the Schubert 12 Lieder—the works contained within this Dover volume—he added the following in the margin: "The word transcription was used by me first—similarly Reminiscences, Paraphrase, Illustration, Score for the Piano." Many composers of the time were particularly delighted with Liszt's efforts, including Gaetano Donizetti and Giacomo Meyerbeer. Donizetti is reported to have written to an unnamed acquaintance: "Buy Liszt's arrangement of the March ["Marche funèbre" from Dom Sébastien]: it will make your hair stand on end." And Meyerbeer himself wrote to Liszt in 1849, highly enthusiastic about the prospect of Liszt making a transcription from the newly premiered Le Prophète. Meyerbeer was not just being polite. He had first-hand knowledge of Liszt's efforts in making transcriptions accurate. He knew it was not unusual for Liszt to work from a copy of a score in order to represent the music properly, a procedure Liszt followed even as late as 1867 when he undertook a transcription from Verdi's Don Carlo.
Apart from his transcriptions of the Beethoven symphonies, undertaken at nearly the same time as the 12 Lieder, Liszt's transcriptions of the Schubert songs remain the largest such project he ever attempted. And although not finished as he had planned originally—only the 14 songs from Schwanengesang and 12 of the 24 from Winterreise were ever published—it remains unmatched as one of the most comprehensive transcription projects in the literature. Like the Beethoven symphonies, the Schubert transcriptions reproduce the original musical text reverently, with minimal flourishes and fairly strict adherence to the original strophic organization: they are among the most literal of all Liszt's transcriptions in the genre.
At the time Liszt was transcribing this music, he had written only one song of his own, a lullaby for his first daughter, Blandine, with a text by a minor poet, the Marchese Bocella, Angiolin dal biondo crin. It is not overstating the case to say that Liszt honed his talent in writing lieder while transcribing these Schubert settings: once started in the song genre, he embarked on the composition of a remarkable series of his own songs to texts by Goethe, Heine, Hugo and Schiller. But apart from six Goethe texts that were common coin for nearly all song composers of the time, Liszt never set a poem that already existed in a Schubert setting. Liszt's lieder show him to have been a quick study: he forges remarkable vocal lines with completely distinctive accompaniments, obviously inspired by the unique Schubert works.
Even in this early corpus, Liszt encapsulated many of the pianistic features that were to become the nineteenth century's stock-in-trade. Such an understanding of the color and sound of the piano was demanded by the very nature of transcribing from the song medium to the piano. The variety that the lieder genre afforded Schubert—the immediacy of a singer conveying to an audience the sense of the song by gesture, eye contact and the use of diction—all of these were unavailable to Liszt. The pianist was left the unenviable task of conveying the sense of the work by sonic means alone. Without question, Liszt's work was made easier with the advantage of new pianos by Érard and Boisselot—manufacturers who shipped their pianos all over Europe in Liszt's wake, in order to have his imprimatur on their latest models. But in the final analysis, it is Liszt's innate feel for the resonance and voicing of the piano that motivated him with these pieces and the genre as a whole. Such considerations remain the most difficult challenges for performers to this day.
One need only look as far as the first transcription in this volume, "Sei mir gegrüßt," to see Liszt's mastery when spacing triadic sonorities. The early stanzas require tasteful balance of melody with accompaniment within one hand—a typical Lisztian technique. However, he compounds the problem in the final stanza, where he doubles the melody in octaves between the hands, contrasting each melodic line with its own widely spaced sonorous accompaniment. With the piano dynamic, and dolcissimo teneramente indication, the result is enthralling. Such examples of elegant registration can be found throughout the collection.
The texture of "Meeresstille" demands special mention. Although rich in harmonic overtones, the slow tempo coupled with the restrained dynamic range impose a sense of spareness on the texture, bringing to mind the immensity of a ship on a motionless sea. This almost static sound is relatively easy to transmit on today's instruments, built to sustain such long-spun sonorities. The weaker voicing possibilities of Liszt's pianos posed a monumental performance problem: producing a tone that could reach through the acoustical performance space. Here we are once again presented with Liszt's amazing ability to think ahead, to force progress, for without the barely achievable texture he wrote in 1838 the later instrument that truly realized his wanted result would not have been produced.
Commentary on Liszt's Schubert transcriptions could fill volumes, but in the present context one cannot overemphasize Liszt's mastery of large-scale tonal organization in the set. Although issued as separate items, the 12 songs are arranged in such a way that a careful and symmetrical tonal plan appears to be one of the principal factors governing the position and choice of songs in this collection. In effect, Liszt has created another Schubert song cycle out of a quite disparate group of songs, some of them very well known. In very much the same way that Liszt collected his own original and previously composed music into sets and anthologies throughout his life—for instance, the Années de pèlerinage and the Harmonies poétiques et religieuses,—he fulfilled what he perceived as Schubert's promise by arranging the 12 songs so they appear to tell a story not unlike that of Die schöne Müllerin or Winterreise. From the opening "Sei mir gegrüßt" to the final "Ave Maria," the newly fashioned cycle spans another period in the life of a Schubert Wanderer: an individual in love, experiencing the seasons and natural phenomena of life, the terror of illness and death and the comfort of religion. It is a logical continuation of the well-established Schubertian thread.
On first glance, the cycle seems to revolve around the tonality of B-flat major, the keys for Nos. 1 ("Sey mir gegrüBt"), 9 ("Ständchen"—'Horch, horch! die Lerche' ['Hark, hark! The Lark']), and 12 ("Ave Maria"). However, on closer examination, the set falls neatly into three equal parts: Nos. 1—4, 5—8 and 9—12, each segment of which could be performed as an independent four-song unit or, taken together, as a complete group of 12. Each four-song group attests to Liszt's handling of types of tonal syntax that were to become the hallmarks of nineteenth-century tonal planning. Songs 1 ("Sei mir gegrüßt) and 4 ("Erlknig") sit squarely in the key that has two flats, be it Bflat major or G minor, prefiguring the equation of relative keys that was not to become standard until after 1860. No. 2 ("Auf dem Wasser zu Singen") remains the quintessential example of the early Schubert lied that alters mode—major vs. minor—at will. The ingenuous tonal plan of No. 3, "Du bist die Ruh," stands in sharp contrast with this relatively advanced tonal thinking.
The second four-song section begins with the "Meeresstille" transcription, which, in Liszt's version, appears as a quasi-preludio to the three works that follow. Initially, one hears No. 5 as an extended dominant extrapolation punctuating the tonic F,the tonal center of No. 6 ("Die junge Nonne"). Then the next two songs (Nos. 7 and 8, "Frühlingsglaube" and "Gretchen am Spinnrade") complement the modal mixtures of "Die junge Nonne": Liszt carries through the F minor tonality to its relative A-flat major in No. 7 ("Frühlingsglaube"), and then extrapolates the F major sonority with that of its relative, D minor, in "Gretchen." This careful arrangement clearly shows that by the year 1838 he was able to control tonal schemes in pieces related by key signature but that shared different tonics.
Liszt initiates the final group, Nos. 9–12, with his sparkling transcription of Horch, horch! die Lerche in B-flat major, the same key as No. 12, "Ave Maria." These B-flat pillars again frame coupled pieces that share the same key signature but have different tonics: "Rastlose Liebe" in E major, and "Der Wanderer," initially in C-sharp minor.
Some of Liszt's publishers—notably Spina in Vienna (the successor to Diabelli), Richault in Paris and Ricordi in Milan—capitalized on his accomplishment and reissued some selections from the 12 Lieder in the late 1830s and early 1840s both as single numbers or in groups with alternative orderings—a process that in some cases ruined Liszt's subtle tonal organization. For this reason, Liszt's part in these subsequent reissues is questionable, although only the Richault and Ricordi editions transmit any dedication whatsoever—to the Countess Marie d'Agoult on "Ave Maria." However, all these early editions prove to be invaluable documents because Liszt's autograph sources for these works appear not to have survived.
The Diabelli editions reproduced in this Dover volume all have elegant, individualized title pages that nevertheless carry similar motifs. In one way or another, the engraver included a radiant sunburst of varying dimensions, sometimes coupling it with a distinctive eight-pointed star, other times with a delicate laurel wreath. Two title pages deserve particular mention for their direct pictorial elements: No. 4, "Erlknig," shows Goethe's fierce elf king at the top of the page, malevolently tucked behind a large sunburst; and No. 8, "Gretchen am Spinnrade," depicts Goethe's Margarete at her spinning wheel with a shadowy, faint figure hovering behind her. It is no surprise that the Goethe texts engendered the most visually compelling title pages, perhaps indicating the popularity of these two pieces in both their musical and literary incarnations.
Liszt's attention to the 12 Lieder did not end with their publication. These lieder transcriptions were always found on his programs, and he used them as examples in his Master Classes in his later years. It also appears that he seriously entertained thoughts of a new edition in the early 1870s, just shortly before he allowed new editions of Winterreise and Schwanengesang by Schlesinger and Haslinger: a Diabelli print of "Rastlose Liebe" was issued by Spina in 1873 for the Vienna World's Fair, and this copy not only carries new engraver's markings but also extensive corrections and emendations by Liszt—clearly in preparation for a new edition. Sadly, it never materialized, and we are left to wonder at what might have been.
Unfortunately, Liszt's Schubert transcriptions never constituted part of the original Liszt Gesamtausgabe published by Breitkopf & Härtel from 1907 to 1936. But the popularity of these works was so great that they were among the first to be included in the Peters Edition edited by one of Liszt's favorite pupils, Emil von Sauer (1862—1942), entitled Werke für Klavier zu zwei Händen, begun in 1917. Sauer's dedication to Liszt's legacy cannot go unmentioned: his editions and his many recordings of the oeuvre are testimony to his wish to see Liszt's vision brought forward into the twentieth century.
Rena Charnin Mueller
New York, 1995
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE SCHUBERT SONG TRANSCRIPTIONS for Solo Piano by Franz Liszt. Copyright © 1995 Dover Publications, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of Dover Publications, Inc..
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