Liszt’s Representation of Instrumental Sounds on the Piano: Colors in Black and White by Hyun Joo Kim (review)

One of the pleasures of studying the music of Franz Liszt is seeing the way in which his compositions reflect nineteenth-century perspectives on literature, philosophy, and the visual arts. Bolstered by his treatises, prefaces, and letters to and from his wide circle of artistic friends, Liszt’s music provides a locus for identifying modes of thought that connect artistic production during this era. Adding to Jonathan Kregor’s work investigating the relationship between Liszt’s transcriptions and literary translation theory and visual printmaking (Liszt as Transcriber [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010]), Hyun Joo Kim takes a deeper dive into Liszt’s connection to visual printmaking.

The introduction provides some background on the importance of art reproduction during the nineteenth century, referencing art historians (Stephen Bann in particular) who have challenged the notion that engravings of other art works are merely copies without unique merit. Kim introduces Liszt’s piano renditions of orchestral works by other composers and himself and the music of Hungarian Gypsy bands as repertoire utilizing similar approaches to visual engravings. The author then refines the terminology, making a distinction between transcriptions and arrangements. For chapters on Liszt’s piano versions of orchestral works, Kim uses the term arrangement because it “tends to embrace both a literal and freer style of reworking, whereas transcription is usually used only in the more literal sense of reproduction” (p. 7). That distinction becomes important in her discussion of the music.

In the first chapter, “Approaching the Reproductive Arts,” Kim provides fascinating background on well-known engravers of the nineteenth century and their critics. The chapter eventually centers on Liszt’s relationship with neoclassical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867), who produced a now-famous drawing of Liszt in Rome in 1839. Liszt not only praised Ingres’s work in one of his “Lettres d’un bachelier ès musique” (Revue et gazette musicale 6, no. 53 [24 October 1839]: 418) but also dedicated his first version of the piano arrangement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fifth and Sixth symphonies to the artist. Kim makes a connection between the light, shade, and shadows Ingres brings to his drawings of sculptures and the ways in which Liszt uses the contrast of register in adding to his arrangements of symphonies.

The second chapter considers Liszt’s solo piano arrangements of orchestral works by Beethoven and Hector Berlioz. In the preface to the Beethoven symphonies, which Kim includes as an appendix, Liszt refers to himself as a “knowledgeable engraver” of these works (p. 160). Identifying these pieces as partitions de piano (piano scores), he defined them as “a meticulous arrangement down to the finest detail” (p. 3). Kim teases out the issues between staying faithful to the score and bringing creativity to the arranging process. The sections of music analysis in this chapter delve into Liszt’s meticulous notation, detailed instrumental cues, performance and expressive markings, and the layout of orchestral textures.

Kim sets up chapter 3, “Between ‘Text’ and ‘Event’: Liszt’s Guillaume Tell Overture,” with an explanation of Carl Dahlhaus’s conception of the dualism of styles from his Nineteenth-Century Music text (Die Musik des 19. Jahrhunderts [Laaber: Laaber, 1980], trans. J. Bradford Robinson [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989]). Beethoven and Rossini represent the binary, with the former connected to text fidelity and the latter with a more improvisatory event. And Liszt was “one of the significant observers, practitioners, and participants in shaping and reshaping the legacy of the symbolic duo” (p. 57). Kim delves into the reworking techniques Liszt incorporates in his partition de piano of Rossini’s overture, reviewing notation, the various treatments of the pastoral “Ranz des vaches,” and the ways in which improvisatory passages are included in this arrangement...