Liszt’s Representation of Instrumental Sounds on the Piano: Colors in Black and White

240 Pages·2019·9.793 MB·English

by  Hyun Joo Kim

LISZT ’S RE PRE SEN TATION
of I N ST RUM E N TA L S OU N D S on
THE PIANO
c o l o r s i n b l a c k a n d w h i t e
Hyun Joo Kim
Liszt’s Representation of
Instrume ntal Sounds on the Piano
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Eastman Studies in Music
Ralph P. Locke, Senior Editor
Eastman School of Music
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Unifying Elements in the Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments
Donald G. Traut
A complete list of titles in the Eastman Studies in Music series may be found
on the University of Rochester Press website, www.urpress.com
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Liszt’s Representation
of Instrumental
Sounds on the Piano
Colors in Black and White
Hyun Joo Kim
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The University of Rochester Press gratefully acknowledges generous support from
the AMS 75 PAYS Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in
part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation.
Copyright © 2019 by Hyun Joo Kim
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no
part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system,
published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted,
recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission of the copyright owner.
First published 2019
University of Rochester Press
668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA
www.urpress.com
and Boydell & Brewer Limited
PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK
www.boydellandbrewer.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-58046-946-3
ISSN: 1071-9989
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kim, Hyun Joo, 1978– author.
Title: Liszt’s representation of instrumental sounds on the piano : colors in black
and white / Hyun Joo Kim.
Other titles: Eastman studies in music ; v. 153.
Description: Rochester : University of Rochester Press, 2019. | Series: Eastman
studies in music ; v. 153 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018054783 | ISBN 9781580469463 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Liszt, Franz, 1811-1886--Criticism and interpretation. | Piano
music—19th century—History and criticism.
Classification: LCC ML410.L7 K54 2019 | DDC 786.2092—dc23 LC record
available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018054783
This publication is printed on acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America.
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Contents
Introduction 1
1 Approaching the Reproductive Arts 14
2 “Partitions de Piano” 37
3 Between “Text” and “Event”: Liszt’s Guillaume Tell Overture 57
4 Translating the Orchestra: Liszt’s Two-Piano Arrangements of
His Symphonic Poems 78
5 Interpretive Fidelity to Gypsy Creativity: Liszt’s Representations of
Hungarian Gypsy Cimbalom Playing 102
Conclusions: Recurring Techniques and Aesthetics 145
Appendix: Liszt’s Preface to His Piano Arrangements of Beethoven’s
Fifth and Sixth Symphonies in the Breitkopf & Härtel Edition, 1840 159
Notes 163
Bibliography 203
Index of Liszt’s Works by Genre 221
Subject Index 225
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Introduction
Style in engraving is the preeminence of drawing over color and of
beauty over richness. I say “color,” because the engraver, although he
has only the limited, monochrome effect of black and white [available
to him], has nevertheless his very own way of being a colorist.
—Charles Blanc
In his Grammaire des arts du dessin (The Grammar of Painting and Engraving), the
art critic Charles Blanc made the sensational and paradoxical assertion that
the engraver, who creates only a “monochrome effect,” is essentially a “color-
ist.” Along similar lines, he argued that “the engraver having at his disposal,
so far as color is concerned, only black and white, ceases to be a copyist and
becomes, instead, a translator.”1 Blanc further described the engraver’s end-
product as similar to that of a translator [of a verbal text], in that it “highlights
the essential [features], that nonetheless manages to indicate everything and
to say everything.”2 The notion of engraving as translation was well ingrained
in the minds of Blanc’s contemporary critics. For instance, the outstanding
engraver Nicolas Ponce (1764–1831) conceived the engraving as “not a copy of
the painting” but “a translation of it, which is different.”3 He makes the further
signifi cant point that the “line” of a print can be translated literally, whereas
the “effect, the color and the harmony of a print” are reliant on the engraver’s
reinterpretation, which requires his “genius.”
Blanc and Ponce brought up the widespread nineteenth-century qualms
about one critical limitation of engraving: the lack of color. Around the same
time, music critics and reviewers also often made an analogy between the
piano transcription and its visual counterpart of engraving by focusing pri-
marily on their mutual defi ciency: the inability to transport the original “col-
ors” literally. E. T. A. Hoffmann’s famous comparison of a piano transcription
to a black-and-white sketch of an oil painting conceives transcription as an
outline of the original music, incapable of conveying its colors and sounds
in depth.4 At the same time both camps of music and art critics understood
how art reproduction stimulates the executor’s imagination in translating
the original colors. As we observed above, Blanc and Ponce considered the
limitation as compelling the engraver to “highlight the essential aspects” of
the original and “create the effect and harmony of his print,” respectively.
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2 ❧ introduction
Furthermore, Ponce’s description of the engraving process, which distin-
guishes the line from the effect or the color, becomes a plausible analogy to
a musical transferal from one medium to another, because that process also
elicits several levels of distinctions between the structure and the effect or
timbres, between a literal and an interpretive rendering, and between the
executor’s fi delity and his creativity.
As an apprentice of Paris’s eminent engravers of the time, such as Luigi
Calamatta and Paul Mercuri, and an advocate of their works as artistically origi-
nal, Blanc reminisced about Calamatta’s studio around 1835, in and around
which painters, printmakers, and musicians interacted.5 According to Blanc’s
report, the periodic visitors to the studio included the infl uential engravers
Ary Scheffer and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, who had drawn or painted
Liszt, as well as pianist-composers such as Chopin and Liszt.6 A frequent guest
in Calamatta’s studio, Liszt was an artist in the vanguard of the latest artistic
aesthetics and philosophies, and he was familiar with engraving. In his preface
to his transcriptions of Beethoven’s Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, published in
1840, Liszt likened his role as transcriber to a “knowledgeable engraver” and
“conscientious translator,” dedicating the fi rst version of the transcriptions to
the celebrated engraver Ingres, with whom he had become acquainted in the
1830s.7 Liszt’s notion of engraving in his preface holds a further implication:
his acknowledgement of engraving as a powerful representational medium
equal to his arrangements. Crucially, the same attitude is found in the oppo-
site direction from Ingres. Just as he regarded prints after his paintings as the
epitome of accomplishment, the eminent painter and engraver, as a devotee
of music, also showed his esteem for the medium of a piano transcription.
Referring to transcriptions of orchestral compositions for piano, presumably
those of Beethoven’s symphonies, Ingres wrote: “I have sublime extracts and,
no small thing, I can hear them over again 23 times if I wish, and in truth I
believe that it’s at the piano that you really come to know a masterpiece.”8
Just as extraordinary printmakers such as Calamatta and Ingres had trained
their eyes and hands by means of engraving before the invention of photogra-
phy, professional composer-arrangers such as Liszt had honed their skills on
the medium of a piano transcription before the invention of recording.9 The
two camps of artists thus embody the extraordinary story of living practitio-
ners in a uniquely innovative part of the Romantic era, pre-photography and
pre-recording, respectively, who already acknowledged the notion of “repro-
ductive” arts. Although seldom addressed in scholarly literature on the profes-
sional, labor-intensive task of reproduction in the visual and musical culture of
the early nineteenth century, these reproductive arts reveal textual fi delity and
artistic creativity in the executor that rivaled and sometimes even surpassed the
original. One of my purposes in this book is to open up the wider issues that
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introduction ❧ 3
arise when we look at the spectrum of modes of Liszt’s reworking of instrumen-
tal sounds in his compositions of this distinctive period.
This book investigates Liszt’s replication and reworking of the existing
instrumental sounds and effects on the piano, drawing on the discipline of
French visual cultural history. I situate Liszt’s focus on instrumental colors in
the cultural and aesthetic context of the nineteenth century’s broader interest
in art reproduction and color and investigate his specifi c compositional strate-
gies by analyzing his renderings of instrumental music for the piano. Such an
analysis demonstrates both his faithful approach to the borrowed model and
his creative pianistic solutions to preserving the model’s integrity effectively.
Much of the previous research on this topic has regarded fi delity and creativity
in Liszt’s reworkings as two separate, contrasting, and contradictory sides of
his compositional method. Yet the two aspects are actually complementary and
mutually motivating, and interact in a dynamic way throughout his reworkings.
The repertoire I take into account in this book comprises three main
groups of pieces. The fi rst group consists of Liszt’s solo-piano arrangements
of orchestral compositions by others, written mostly during his virtuoso years
in the 1830s and 1840s, which Liszt designated Partitions de piano, adopting the
French term for score.10 Liszt himself described his unique concept of “parti-
tions de piano”—that is, a meticulous arrangement down to the fi nest detail—as
he embarked on his arrangement of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique and as he
further refi ned the concept in the preface to his arrangements of Beethoven’s
symphonies.
The second group is Liszt’s middle-period arrangements of his own sym-
phonic poems for two pianos in his Weimar years of 1848–61. Liszt’s two-piano
arrangements align themselves with his earlier partitions with respect to his
meticulous approach to the original orchestral score. By shifting the medium
of solo piano to two pianos, Liszt reinvigorated the interaction of fi delity and
creativity in accordance with new reworking methods for the new medium.
The third group expands the concept of orchestral arrangement to embrace
Liszt’s “arrangement” of Hungarian Gypsy–ensemble music in his Hungarian
Rhapsodies that mostly appeared in 1851–53, with a focus on his renderings of
cimbalom playing. Although the original material encompasses seemingly dis-
parate traditions, Western orchestral art music and Hungarian popular Gypsy
music, both kinds of transferal could make legitimate claims to employ the
fi delity–creativity interactive mode of Liszt’s reworking. If Liszt’s arrangements
of orchestral scores by Berlioz and Beethoven represent the pinnacle of his
overt faithfulness to his models and at the same time his creativity in represent-
ing orchestral music on the piano, his Rhapsodies, at the other end of the spec-
trum, encapsulate an artistic creativity that goes far beyond his models along
with a conscientious and faithful rendering of their sounds and gestures.
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