Liszt as Transcriber by Jonathan Kregor (review)

A welcome trend in recent Liszt studies is a new appreciation for the ideological underpinnings of the composer’s opera fantasies and concert paraphrases (see Dana Gooley’s The Virtuoso Liszt (Cambridge, 2004) and Bruno Moysan’s Liszt, virtuose subversif (Paris, 2010), among others). Liszt’s imaginative reworkings of the music of his contemporaries and predecessors reveal his involvement in the Romantic avant-garde, his efforts to integrate music with the literary and visual arts, and his role in the formation of a canon centred around the Austro-German musical tradition. Jonathan Kregor brilliantly addresses all these issues in his recent book on Liszt’s piano transcriptions, providing strong evidence for reading these nominally more faithful arrangements as equally bold artistic statements.

In a concise introduction, Kregor lays out an ambitious agenda for the following six chapters: to demonstrate that transcriptions in the nineteenth century were as much about commentary and interpretation as they were about fidelity to the original text; to view Liszt’s transcription of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique as an apologia both for the work’s eccentricities and for Liszt’s pre-eminence as an interpreter; to trace the emergence of an increasingly interventionist approach in Liszt’s Schubert transcriptions; to argue that Liszt sought to establish himself as Beethoven’s heir apparent through his edition of the nine symphonies; to expose latent personal and professional tensions evident in the Wagner transcriptions; and to read Liszt’s late transcriptions as a continuation of his youthful experimental streak. Kregor achieves these goals with varying degrees of success, drawing upon sources and methodologies ranging from previously overlooked compositional sketches to an array of theoretical writings from the nineteenth century to the present.

In the first chapter, Kregor situates transcriptions among other nineteenth-century modes of reproduction, notably engraving and literary translation. Where such analogies can often seem forced, here the author successfully traces the development of parallel approaches to artistic reinterpretation informed by Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought, nascent ideas of culture and nationalism, new approaches to biblical hermeneutics, and so on. The chapter concludes with an illuminating comparison of the ‘Lacrimosa’ from Mozart’s Requiem as transcribed by Czerny, Thalberg, and Liszt. Kregor likens Czerny’s approach to that of a literary paraphrase, ‘where priority is given to maintaining word-for-word—or in this case note-for-note—fidelity’ (p. 20). In contrast to Czerny’s traditional disposition of melody and accompaniment, Thalberg—famed for his ability to make the piano ‘sing’—uses his celebrated ‘three-hand’ texture to foreground Mozart’s choral writing, a solution that in Kregor’s view is still an overtly pianistic approach. Only with Liszt do we see an attempt to preserve a number of the piece’s defining characteristics, demanding a radical departure from conventional solutions. A pianist himself, Kregor displays a keen awareness of the physical effect of playing Liszt’s transcription, noting how the implied fingerings seem designed to compel the performer to produce the ‘sighing’ articulations necessary to the piece’s dolorous character.

Kregor’s argument that Liszt’s technical innovations were largely motivated by the desire to explicate key expressive features comes into sharper focus in the subsequent chapter on the Symphonie fantastique transcription. For example, he notes how Liszt emphasizes the tense qualities of the string writing that accompanies the initial appearance of the main theme of Berlioz’s work: ‘The violent manner in which the pianist must execute the treacherous downward leaps of m. 84ff. distinguishes an even clearer profile for the idée fixe’ (p. 46). Similarly, Kregor observes how Liszt references this gesture in subsequent iterations of the theme, subtly altering Berlioz’s original to foster motivic unity between movements. At times the author’s eagerness to impute an ideological or rhetorical function to the composer’s alterations fails to convince, as in his interpretation of a new approach to a transitional passage in Liszt’s 1866 version of the Symphonie’s march:

Here Liszt...