Prelude and Fugue in A minor BWV543

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)

Prelude and Fugue in A minor for organ BWV 543 (1708-23)

transcribed for piano by Franz Liszt

While Liszt was not incapable of doing violence to the music he transcribed for piano, he had such veneration for some works - like the Beethoven symphonies and Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique - that he approached them with the utmost respect, treating them in so far as he could as sacred texts. The six Bach preludes and fugues for organ (BWV 543-8) that he transcribed between 1842 and 1850 are in that same category. He added nothing, not even dynamic markings or phrasing, and took nothing away. The major problem he had, of course, was the organ pedal-board part, which he had to accommodate within the capabilities of two hands already engaged with their own contrapuntal lines - a problem intensified by the fact that, to reflect their acoustic impact, he felt he had to present the pedal-board contributions in left-hand octaves. The success of his arrangement is clear enough from the dramatic part played by the left-hand octaves in the brilliantly scored Prelude in A minor and, above all, from their structurally crucial intervention at the climax of the Fugue, just before the concluding cadenza.

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)

Prelude and Fugue in A minor BWV543

arranged for piano by Franz Liszt (1811-1886)

Liszt wrote literally hundreds of piano arrangements, involving more than fifty composers from Bach to Verdi and covering everything between the literal translation and the ambitious paraphrase. His transcriptions of the six organ Preludes and Fugues BWV543-548 - which he wrote between 1842 and 1850 and which earn Liszt a place alongside Mendelssohn as one of the pioneer heroes of the Bach revival - are among the most modest of all his arrangements. This is not to say that they are undramatic or unchallenging but it does mean that Liszt added nothing of his own - no harmonies or keyboard decorations that are not in the original and not even one dynamic marking or tempo direction to replace those which Bach himself omitted.

The major problem for Liszt in these work was to accommodate the pedal organ in a version for a performer with just two hands and one keyboard at his disposal. His solution is all the more remarkable in that nearly every pedal passage is rendered in left-hand octaves, which in the present A minor Fugue can leave the right hand with managing as many as three contrapuntal voices at once. In terms of sonority this treatment in octaves is certainly sensational, from the very first pedal A in the Prelude to its first entry in the Fugue and its virtuoso part in the closing cadenza.

Liszt’s only other arrangement of Bach for the piano, incidentally - the Fantasia and Fugue in G minor completed in 1872 - is less modest but still, in comparison with the showy efforts of later pianist-composers, admirably faithful to the original.