Three Schubert Marches

Reitermarsch: allegro vivace con brio- andante siciliano - allegro - prestissimo

Of all the dozens of composers whose music Liszt arranged, transcribed fantasised on or otherwise appropriated, Schubert was very definitely his favourite. Paganini was crucially influential in the development of his piano technique but no one meant more to him than Schubert, whom he never met but whose music inspired a lasting affection. That much is clear from the fifty or so song transcriptions, many of them exquisitely sensitive, he wrote between 1835 and 1846. While it is true that the arrangements he made of Schubert’s piano-duet Marches in 1846 can scarcely be described as sensitive, they are clearly the product of a composer enjoying himself with Schubert’s melodies and harmonies as he goes about making every note intended for four hands available to two, elaborating the textures in his own way and enlarging unpretentious structures to more imposing proportions. Whether Schubert himself would have enjoyed the rough and tumble is another question.

It is an indication of Liszt’s proprietary attitude towards these pieces that he calls seven Schubert marches into service to fabricate three new ones. The one piece he leaves structurally intact is the Grande Marche in E flat minor D819 No5. In other respects, however - beginning with the Trauermarsch (Funeral March) title, which is his own idea - he takes many liberties with it, above all in the increasingly extravagant decorations applied to the E flat major Trio section and his doom-laden treatment of the Andante mesto material on its return at the end. Most of the second piece - which Liszt did not adorn with a new title - comes from the Grande Marche in B minor D819 No3. Not satisfied, however, with the melodious Trio section in B major, with its thematic anticipation of Mendelssohn’s Wedding March, Liszt goes on to introduce another Trio, this one from Schubert’s Grande Marche funèbre D859, to which he eventually applies the full panoply of piano colour on three staves. Although Liszt had not yet made his transcription of the Wedding March from Mendelssohn’s incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he surely knew it at this time. It no doubt amused him to set a funeral march alongside what might well have been the source of at least one tune in the Wedding March - a tune which, incidentally, he inflates to heroic proportions just before the end.

Schubert’s Marche caractéristique in C major D886 No1 is not, in its 6/8 metre and galloping rhythms, a characteristic march. In adopting it as the basis of the third of these pieces, Liszt explains the anomaly away by calling it Reitermarsch (Cavalry March) and joyfully rides off with it. The Trio section, however, which Schubert intended to proceed at the same Allegro vivace pace, he slows down to an Andante siciliano and then adds a delicately scored version of the A minor Trio from the second of the Marches caractéristiques. Why he expanded the middle section still further by introducing 4/4 episodes from two of the Grandes Marches D819, it is difficult to imagine. Anyway, he welcomes back the 6/8 material in no uncertain terms when it makes its prestissimo return and even manages to integrate a triumphant allusion to the more tuneful of the 4/4 episodes in the clattering coda.