Liszt as Transcriber (review)

Generalist studies are rare nowadays. They usually come either in the form of a magnum opus or an early scholarly work of modest proportions that picks up a very large yet oddly neglected subject. Jonathan Kregor's new book is an example of the latter. It may give the false impression of a niche interest, but in fact covers a vast area that could easily be populated by many more publications. Far from taking up a little corner of Liszt studies, this timely book is about a repertoire that comprises about half of Liszt's oeuvre, and even more broadly about the piano transcription phenomenon at its historical height. With hundreds of transcriptions to choose from, the author wisely avoids a catalogue-like account and instead provides a series of selective studies that collectively give us a highly engaging though partial view of the whole. The narrative structure weds chronology to specific issues, so that each chapter deals with a different time in Liszt's life and, correspondingly, with specific transcription genres and aesthetic challenges tackled in that era. The crisp prose and the author's willingness to demonstrate his meaning in many useful music examples make this book both enjoyable and highly accessible to any musically literate reader.

Kregor's overriding thesis, as stated in the introduction, is that "Liszt had made the transcriber visible," giving him new roles as "composer, amanuensis, critic, propagandist, historian, [and] trendsetter" (p. 4). That he achieved through two extremes, both of which defied piano reduction conventions: hyper-realistic reproduction on the one hand and unprecedented subjectivity and compositional intervention on the other. In the first chapter Kregor explores the background to these developments, most specifically the revolutionary approach to translation of the early nineteenth-century Athenaeum circle in Germany, which insisted—against older traditions of easy domestication—on "foreignizing" the target language (i.e. maintaining the associative meanings, flavor and idioms of the source language) in order to create a more direct "conduit to the author" (p. 15). Short of actually declaring a direct influence of this school of thought on Liszt, Kregor reveals the interesting fact that Liszt did have an intellectual interest in the art of translation (p. 29). More importantly, he broadly subscribed to the same aesthetic by refusing preset rules and idiomatic solutions native to the piano transcription, and by inserting extensive ossia passages that provided a different "conduit" to the source material. The second great nonmusical influence came from the more contemporary sphere of Parisian fine arts in the 1830s, where advances in art reproduction techniques created copies that were considered artworks in themselves. Kregor draws rich analogies to Liszt's craft, and shrewdly suggests that Liszt's dedication of the 1837 Beethoven transcriptions to Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres could also be read in this context (p. 39).

The second chapter looks at how a unique artistic collaboration in the 1830s between Liszt and Berlioz resulted in the epoch-making transcription of the Symphonie Fantastique (1833), a work that became an influential piano piece in its own right. The Berlioz-Liszt collaboration was not unlike the Parisian artist-printmaker relationship: just as prints could heighten certain aspects of the original painting, so too Liszt's attention to accompaniment figures, for example, brought such elements into much sharper relief than in the original symphony. Beyond seeking to recover timbral hues on an unprecedented scale, then, Liszt's larger point was that "high-definition" piano transcriptions—just like the best prints—can reveal certain aspects of the work even better than the original. Kregor gives many illuminating examples of this from Liszt's music, but at least one example from the original Berlioz could have made the comparison clearer.

The next two chapters deal with Liszt's musical monuments from the late 1830s to Schubert and Beethoven. The Schubert chapter concentrates on how Liszt became an authorial translator, effectively recomposing Schubert's lieder and sometimes reacting independently to their poetic texts. Comparatively speaking, of all the works Kregor...