Wagner

A large proportion of Liszt’s creativity was devoted to writing piano transcriptions of music by other composers. Omnivorous in his taste and tireless in his industry, he made more than 200 such arrangements, many of them masterpieces in their own right. Some are as close to the original as he could make them; others are transformed by extravagant developments of his own. The 1867 piano version of the Liebestod from the end of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde is one of the former kind. Apart from four bars taken from the second-act love duet as an introduction and a somewhat elaborated ending, it is a straightforward and yet miraculous translation of a legato flux of vocal and orchestral sound to an essentially percussive instrument. Written nearly 20 years earlier, the transcription of Schumann’s Widmung is rather more self-indulgent. After adopting a comparatively modest attitude to the original in the first few lines of the song, Liszt takes it upon himself to repeat that section in colours very much of his own. When the harmonies change to the minor modesty is restored, as it is with the sensitively achieved return to the major. The opening material is recalled not as Schumann conceived it, however, but as Liszt recoloured it and enlarged it. Happily, although it does not survive unscathed, Schumann’s beautiful piano postlude retains its chastity.