Transcriptions can be divisive. Taking an existing work and recreating it with a different instrument, voice or ensemble: some will say that these works are wrong, or always inferior to the original, or some kind of lesser pursuit. And it is true that there are some pieces that probably shouldn’t be transcribed, that already feel like the ultimate expression of those musical ideas, and there is no sense that they would work as well in any other form. But those who are against transcriptions ignore the incredible possibilities that the best transcriptions can offer.
You have to ask, first of all: what is a transcription, really? Why is playing Bach on a Steinway, so different to the original instrument he wrote for, not a transcription of a kind? Yet we easily accept that, and appreciate the different range of sounds through which a modern piano expresses Bach’s music.
'A work can have several identities'
Transcriptions can be revelatory. When I first heard the ballet Mayerling, which was premiered in 1978 and transcribed pieces of music by Liszt, including some of his piano music, I was absolutely astonished. Hearing the music in that orchestral context revealed new qualities - suddenly I heard harmonies and modulation and much more, that sometimes we lose sight of with Liszt because the pianism itself is such a dominating feature of his music. So Mayerling gave me a new appreciation, not to say liking, for Liszt!
Liszt himself was a great transcriber. His piano paraphrases on operas by Verdi and Wagner are great, and he also transcribed a lot of his own music himself - there are many versions of his Mazeppa, for instance. Because Liszt clearly believed that a work can have several identities, which different instrumentations can bring out. And many other composers also transcribed - Brahms, Ravel and Prokofiev among them.
Needless to say, since I have just released a solo recording of my own transcriptions, of music from Bach to Prokofiev to The Jungle Book, I absolutely love transcriptions! But to do them well, and for them to be meaningful, there has to be a reason to do the transcribing. So to help explore what some of those reasons might be, here are five of the transcriptions by other musicians that I most enjoy listening to, and what each shows us about the art of transcribing…
Five great transcriptions
1. Strauss arr. Rosenthal: Carnaval de Vienne
I love it for... the love of the game
With every transcription, there is a game-like element. It’s almost like a puzzle - will this work? Once you decide to make a transcription, the amount of freedom you have within the given frame is enormous, so there is joy and playfulness.
'It's almost like a puzzle - will this work?'
And part of that can be about the attitude of the performer. In this recording, I adore the elegance of the playing - it’s an extremely hard piece, yet the Polish pianist Moriz Rosenthal finds such charm. It harks back to that late 19th-century style. One can almost imagine him with a cigar in his mouth, relaxed and having fun.
When I write a transcription, it’s alway with how I will play it in my mind. So with a lot of the notes that I write, I barely touch the keys, because the point is not to make them all sound very precise, but to create a sort of blurry texture. Transcriptions require a different way of playing because the piano is not meant to sound like a piano, so to speak, you’re evoking another instrumentation. So there is often playfulness in the approach, both from transcriber and performer - who might be one and the same!
2. Percy Grainger: 'Died For Love' (folk song)
I love it because... sometimes different is the point
Like Bartók and others, Percy Grainger gathered folk songs, and this is one of them. But he would have heard this in an a cappella version, sung by one specific person who he came across on his travels. Grainger said that folk melodies are eternal so nobody could have composed them. I take this to mean that we can view such songs as collective works, created over many years and evolved organically through thousands of singers.
So in that sense, Grainger isn’t transcribing any definitive version of a work - this song has already been changing a lot and there are many different versions over all of those years. Grainger is both transcribing that one way he heard it sung to him in the countryside by one particular singer, and in a sense he is at the same time creating an entirely new piece, doubtless completely different from whatever the original was.
This transcription has an extremely sophisticated piano part, that hints at some kind of accompaniment by another instrument, perhaps a lute. And I love this version, it’s so well sung and played!
This Grainger transcription reminds me of that quote by the Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges, that 'every reader…should misunderstand the text. He should change it into something else.'
3. Godowsky: Studies on Chopin’s Etudes: No.25 in A-Flat Major on Etude, Op.25 No.1 (3rd version)
I love it because... limits are there for pushing
I don’t love Godowsky as a composer, but his pianistic creativity was unbelievable, even revolutionary. He arranged each Chopin étude for the left hand alone, and then created many in new two-hands versions - but they often sound like four hands, because there is so much incredible new material! He opened up what the piano could do to an incredible degree. He made 53 études from Chopin’s 24. Some are in several versions (even seven versions!).
In some of the versions, he goes wild and really does his own thing, based on harmonic ideas in the Chopin original. And throughout there is the element of pushing the limits of what a piano and a pianist can do. Much of Godowsky’s pianistic knowledge was self-taught, which might have contributed to such an unusual and untypical kind of creativity.
So, the lesson for transcriptions? Don’t be afraid to push the limits!
4. Balakirev, arr. Lyapunov Islamey
I love it because... transcription can mean revelation
My main sources of inspiration are the original works, but there are things to be learnt from other people’s transcriptions, and some can make things possible that are impossible in the original. So this transcription of Balakirev’s notoriously-difficult-to-play piece, Islamey, is from piano to orchestra, but there are moments in the original where you can hear that even the greatest pianists are clearly suffering, or there are tempos they have to take a bit carefully, simply because the piece is just so incredibly difficult!
So this orchestral version, transcribed by Sergey Lyapunov, reveals a lot. It was the first time I had heard the work in the tempo that Balakirev actually asks for. And the piano original has much more collision in the sound, because of the percussive nature of the keys, which means that while you hear the impact of the harmony more strongly, you don’t have the colours revealed by an orchestra, nor the possibilities to play with a lightness that can be achieved orchestrally. So the gains go both ways.
And as pianist who has played this (and suffered accordingly!), there are interpretive revelations in this transcription - moments where you suddenly hear, and understand, things in the music that previously seemed ‘hidden’.
It’s also worth remembering that a lot of keyboard music is written with an orchestra in mind, even with Liszt. Keyboard music by its nature very often has a tendency to hint at something other than itself. So transcribing a solo piano work for orchestra isn’t as ‘out there’ as it might seem!
Did you know that Balakirev was one of the five Russian composers known as the Mighty Handful?
5. Mendelssohn, arr. Rachmaninov A Midsummer Night’s Dream
I love it for... something old - something new!
On the one hand this transcription is simply extremely good, so everyone should hear it! It also goes beyond anything that Mendelssohn wrote for piano - he was always much more conservative pianistically, and this transcription forces you to engage with this famous work in a different way than had he thought of writing it as a piano piece originally.
But here’s something else. Transcriptions from orchestral works can lead to something totally new. I have made two transcriptions of massive Russian works - Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade and Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet - and the entire scope, structure and vocabulary has to be different. For example, in Romeo you have a crescendo that lasts for six minutes! You never have any crescendo that lasts that long in solo piano music, even in a huge work.
So finding ways to transcribe that leads to another kind of piano music. And you are both doing something that refers to something else that we are familiar with, and on the other hand creating something new, also because there aren’t many original piano works written in the same way that a transcription of an orchestral piece would be.
And finally....
None of these transcriptions are ones that I would do or done in the way that I would do them - if they were there wouldn’t be any point in my creating my own transcriptions! - but there is something fascinating to be learnt from each one.
So let me finish with one more transcription of my own, that encompassed for me quite a lot of the above - Rachmaninov’s Russian Song no.3, Op.41, transposed from choir and orchestra to solo piano - and I’m very happy it’s in the world!
Florian Noack’s latest album of his own piano transcriptions, I Wanna Be Like You, is released on La Dolce Volta