FRANZ LISZT : The Schubert Transcriptions I (Leslie Howard) 3CD (1998) APE (image+.cue), lossless

Although the young Liszt was in Vienna in the early 1820s, and although he was met and encouraged by Beethoven, he does not seem to have encountered the other master who was to have the greatest influence upon his musical style. The only Viennese connection between Schubert and Liszt, which also includes Beethoven, is that they were each commissioned by Diabelli to contribute a variation on his ‘cobbler’s patch’ waltz for his grand publication comprising variations from all the available luminaries of the day.
But Liszt the pianist immediately took up Schubert the composer by performing the ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy (which Schubert had deemed unplayable), along with other important keyboard and chamber works. Liszt’s proselytizing zeal for Schubert never diminished, and his transcriptions cover a period of some fifty years. Liszt was also to conduct the first performance of Schubert’s opera Alfonso und Estrella; he conducted the ‘Great’ C major Symphony (without the cuts which Schumann had found necessary) and he even attempted to collect material to write a Schubert biography which, alas, he was not to complete. Liszt published instructive editions of Schubert’s sonatas, fantasies, impromptus, moments musicaux, dances and music for piano duet, and he produced a very acceptable version of the ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy for piano and orchestra. He made a version for solo voice, chorus and orchestra or piano of Die Allmacht, and published orchestral accompaniments to Die junge Nonne, Gretchen am Spinnrade, Lied der Mignon and Erlkönig. (He announced future publication of orchestral versions of Der Doppelgänger and Abschied, but only a manuscript for the first of these has been found to date.) And he produced an excellent set of four marches for orchestra or piano duet, all re-workings and re-combinings of various duet pieces by Schubert. But the greatest testimony to Schubert is Liszt’s extensive catalogue of transcriptions for solo piano of songs and of piano duets.

It seems almost unthinkable that such a beloved composer as Schubert should have had some difficulty in establishing a reputation during his life and that his posthumous fame was not guaranteed by the general public for quite some time after his death. For example, in Musical Thoughts and Afterthoughts, Alfred Brendel reports Rachmaninov’s asseveration, amazing if true, that he did not know that Schubert had written piano sonatas. (He did record the great Duo Sonata with Fritz Kreisler, however.) The early nineteenth century viewed the lied as an essentially domestic commodity. Liszt’s transcriptions, more than anything else, got this music into the concert hall, whence it has never departed since. As Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau has written: ‘It was Franz Liszt, with his much scorned transcriptions, who, through piano arrangements alone, assisted greatly in the propagation of German song.’ The Schubert revival of the twentieth century, and especially the view of the song oeuvre as a whole, has also been largely at the hands of pianists – specialist accompanists like Gerald Moore, Geoffrey Parsons and Graham Johnson – who have politely coerced singers into broadening both their repertoires and their understanding of the best songwriter of them all. And now that Schubert’s originals stand in no fear of neglect there is much complementary pleasure and edification to be had from Liszt’s vast library of lovingly crafted piano pieces based upon Schubert’s music.

The present survey of Liszt’s Schubert transcriptions comprises nine compact discs in three sets of three and contains all versions and variant readings known at the time of writing (with the exception of a few brief ossia-simplified alternative passages). It will be immediately clear to any student of the published Liszt catalogues that there are many variant versions of some of the works which are either unknown to the cataloguers, or so insufficiently described as to make unclear the differences in the various editions and manuscripts. Whilst to cover all of Liszt’s alternative readings of all of his works – especially if the variation applies just to a few bars – would increase this recording project beyond all decent bounds, Liszt’s particular zeal with his Schubert transcriptions makes this exception a worthy one.

The Soirées de Vienne addressed such a real need and an obvious difficulty that their present neglect is quite shameful. Schubert produced several hundreds of short dance pieces for piano, many of them in sets which were possibly intended for continuous dancing or domestic entertainment but which are, because of their individual brevity, the sameness of their length, and their often unvaried tonality, very awkward to programme in concert. For the same reason the few surviving dance sets for piano by Mozart and Beethoven are largely ignored by recitalists. But these dances contain a wealth of delightful music which, as Liszt perceived from the beginning with his customary astuteness, requires rescuing and assorting with discreet habiliments for public use. Liszt concocted continuous suites from selected dances, often making a better point than Schubert did of the sheer originality of them by the use of contrasting tonality, and from time to time allowing himself the occasional variation, introduction, interlude or coda. Schubert’s sometimes rather rudimentary style of piano writing is generously and touchingly filled out without the slightest recourse to the applause-gathering trickery to which many a nineteenth-century piano waltz falls victim. These refined waltz sequences laid the ground for the structures of some of the most memorable of the Strauss waltzes, and find echoes as late as Prokofiev. The adventures of the various dances are easily followed and, for the comfort of the searchers amongst the available sources, Schubert’s original themes are identified in each work in the order in which Liszt has them appear.
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