Piano Transcriptions
The piano is a keyboard instrument with an unusually large range of notes. Its versatility means that it can play the works of many composers, including some that are not suited to other instruments. The art of piano transcription is a well-established tradition. Among the many pianists who excelled in this art were Leopold Godowsky, Moriz Rosenthal, and Sergei Rachmaninoff.
One way in which the work of a composer can be brought to a wider audience is by being transcribed for piano. The process of transcribing a piece of music for the piano can result in an entirely new work that has its own identity. A well-made piano transcription will take into account the unique qualities of the instrument and reinterpret the original work to suit its limitations.
There is an enormous body of music by Johann Sebastian Bach that has been transcribed for the piano. Some of these have been written by Bach himself, others by his contemporaries. The compositions of other composers have also been transcribed for the piano by other musicians, most notably by Ferruccio Busoni. The piano was the most popular instrument for playing such transcriptions, and they remain in wide use today.
Piano Transcriptions of Various Composers
While Bach had a major impact on shaping the tonal system, he was also very comfortable with older modal forms and genres. For example, he made several chromatic fantasias in the style of earlier composers such as Dowland and Sweelinck. He even wrote an aria for oboe in a keyboard arrangement of Marcello’s Oboe Concerto, complete with explicit ornamentation, which oboists still employ when performing the concerto centuries later.
In his final years, Bach published organ works that used the older modal idioms. However, he also began to incorporate more of the features of the stile antico in his own compositions. For example, the fourth volume of his Clavier-Ubung contains a number of canons that use polyphonic structures and other elements of the stile antico. The St Matthew Passion and the Mass in B minor were composed during this period.
Bach’s own organ compositions were often accompanied by vocal works for solo singers or choirs. His cantatas are characterized by recitative-aria pairs (or solos and duets) and a concluding choral.
The 1830s and 1840s saw the first performances of a number of these vocal works. Felix Mendelssohn played an important role in launching the 19th-century Bach Revival with his 1829 performance of the St Matthew Passion. Various other performances and increased coverage of his work in print media contributed to this revival.
Franz Liszt was an assiduous performer of the works of other composers, especially by means of piano transcription. He created a large body of such works, both orchestral and song transcriptions. His orchestral works are not simple arrangements, but rather aim to evoke the sound of the individual instruments and challenge the pianist to develop his technique to a higher level. His best known song transcriptions, based on Schubert songs, demonstrate his inventiveness in preserving the vocal line while challenging the pianist to enrich the accompaniment.
