Collaboration and Content in the Symphonie fantastique Transcription Author(s): JONATHAN KREGOR Reviewed work(s): Source: The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Spring 2007), pp. 195-236 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jm.2007.24.2.195 . Accessed: 23/01/2012 05:50 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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Collaboration and Content in the Symphonie fantastique Transcription J O N AT H A N K R E G O R

I

t was Charles Hallé who best captured the most famous performance of Franz Liszt’s solo piano transcription of Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique: To return to my own experiences in 1836, I have to relate that a few days after having made the acquaintance of Chopin, I heard Liszt for the first time at one of his concerts, and went home with a feeling of

The present article has been enriched considerably through valuable advice and close readings by Detlef Altenburg, Mark Evan Bonds, Jon Finson, Dana Gooley, Thomas Forrest Kelly, Evelyn Liepsch, Rena Charnin Mueller, and Karen Painter. I am especially grateful to Sean Gallagher and Alexander Rehding for their indefatigable support. Consultation of primary-source materials at the Goethe- und Schillerarchiv was made possible by a grant from the Stiftung Weimarer Klassik. Abbreviations C.G.I = Hector Berlioz, Correspondance Générale I, ed. Pierre Citron (Paris: Flammarion, 1972). C.G.II = Hector Berlioz, Correspondance Générale II, ed. Frédéric Robert (Paris: Flammarion, 1975). C.G.IV = Hector Berlioz, Correspondance Générale IV, ed. Pierre Citron, Yves Gérard, and Hugh J. Macdonald (Paris: Flammarion, 1983). Liszt/d’Agoult = Franz Liszt and Marie d’Agoult, Correspondance, ed. Serge Gut and Jacqueline Bellas (Paris: Fayard, 2001). NZfM = Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. D-WRgs = Weimar, Goethe- und Schillerarchiv US-Wc = Washington, D.C., Library of Congress, Music Division The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 24, Issue 2, pp. 195–236, ISSN 0277-9269, electronic ISSN 1533-8347. © 2007 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/ jm.2007.24.2.195.

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the journal of musicology thorough dejection. Such marvels of executive skill and power I could never have imagined. . . . The power he drew from his instrument was such as I have never heard since, but never harsh, never suggesting “thumping.” His daring was as extraordinary as his talent. At an orchestral concert given by him and conducted by Berlioz, the “Marche au supplice,” from the latter’s “Symphonie fantastique,” that most gorgeously instrumented piece, was performed, at the conclusion of which Liszt sat down and played his own arrangement, for the piano alone, of the same movement, with an effect even surpassing that of the full orchestra, and creating an indescribable furore. The feat had been duly announced in the programme beforehand, a proof of his indomitable courage.1

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In one epochal event, Hallé succinctly tied together several strands of Liszt’s virtuosity: his bold, commanding artistic profile (much stronger, apparently, than that of Chopin), a nuanced technique that not only transcends the clichés of the Parisian virtuosos but allows him literally to conjure unheard-of sounds from his instrument, and an ability to overwhelm his audience with a power greater than any orchestra could ever realize. In short, no other pianist—hence Hallé’s dejection—could have achieved such a performance. It is of little consequence that several details of this account are inaccurate. Berlioz was not the conductor when Liszt played the second and fourth movements at the transcription’s premiere in 1834 (it was actually François-Antoine Habeneck), nor did he perform the fourth movement after an orchestral performance when Berlioz conducted in 1844. In fact, Liszt’s performance of portions of the work in 1836 did not include the orchestral version at all.2 Spotty memory aside, however, Hallé’s point is clear: That day Liszt and his “orchestra” of ten fingers mobilized sounds of such strength—indeed violence—that Berlioz’s orchestra was utterly subdued, if not annihilated altogether. Hallé’s report continues to remain popular because it evocatively recreates Liszt’s first duel, with the courageous, heroic victor flaunting what Dana Gooley has called Liszt’s “military aura,” a facet of the performer that would become integral to his triumphs on stage over the next 15 years.3 But at an even more substantive level, Hallé’s story success1 C. E. and Marie Hallé, eds., Life and Letters of Sir Charles Hallé (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1896), 37–38. 2 Adrian Williams seems to have been the first to discuss, perhaps even note, this discrepancy. He suggests the 4 May 1844 concert as the only plausible one in which Hallé heard Liszt perform part of the Symphonie fantastique under similar circumstances. If this is true, Hallé listened to an execution of the second movement, not the fourth. See Adrian Williams, Portrait of Liszt: By Himself and His Contemporaries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 84–85. 3 Dana Gooley explores the ubiquitous military imagery of Liszt’s virtuosity in his The Virtuoso Liszt (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004), chap. 2.

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kregor fully unites two seemingly independent strands of the pianist’s persona: the fiery, dueling Liszt and the sympathetic arranger Liszt, the artist responsible for transferring Beethoven’s symphonies, Schubert’s lieder, and selections from Wagner’s operas to the keyboard with ostensibly little or no loss of effect. Indeed, Hallé’s account seems an outright affront to the artist and composer Berlioz, suggesting that Liszt’s arrangement of Berlioz’s march was even more powerful, more terrifying (that is, more suited to the program of the “Marche au supplice”), and better “orchestrated” than the original, a position with which many would take issue today. The enduring popularity of Hallé’s recollection illustrates how Liszt’s biographers, in a tradition that extends back to Robert Schumann’s 1835 review of the work in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, have continued to afford the arrangement of the Symphonie fantastique a primacy of place among his more than 300 similar productions for solo piano.4 Alan Walker wonders of Berlioz’s work in his 1983 Liszt biography: “Is there more idiosyncratic music anywhere?” His answer comes in the form of a musical example, measures 97–104 of the “Marche au supplice,” which not only “would have rolled across the halls like peals of thunder” but “which, at times, approaches the accuracy of a mirror held up to the object it seeks to reflect.”5 Walker here waxes lyrical over a topic that—like the Lisztian duel—has become a staple in Liszt scholarship. Indeed, Humphrey Searle, writing almost 20 years before Walker, calls Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique “surely one of the most unpianistic works ever written!” He, too, supplies the same eight measures from the “Marche” as a self-understood explanation of Liszt’s superhuman ability to “recast the texture [of Berlioz’s original] as to make the piano give an orchestral effect.”6 There is no doubt that the Symphonie fantastique arrangement offers a snapshot of just how far Liszt’s already impressive keyboard technique and keen investigation of the pianoforte’s sonic potential had progressed by 1833. Liszt himself considered the transcription his most ambitious work to date, and he would not publish compositions of such scope until almost half a decade later, when he launched the Vingt-quatres grandes 4 See Robert Schumann, “ ‘Aus dem Leben eines Künstlers.’ Phantastische Symphonie in 5 Abtheilungen von Hector Berlioz,” NZfM 3/1, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 (3 July, 31 July–14 August 1835): 1–2, 33–35, 37–38, 41–51. Two valuable English translations of Schumann’s review exist: Hector Berlioz, Fantastic Symphony, ed. Edward T. Cone (New York: Norton, 1971), 222–48; and Robert Schumann, “Review of Berlioz: Fantastic Symphony,” in Music Analysis in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Ian Bent (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), 2:161–94. 5 Alan Walker, Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years, 1811–1847 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1983; rev. ed. 1988), 180–81. 6 Humphrey Searle, The Music of Liszt (New York: Dover, 1966), 7–8.

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études (retitled for the 1851 publication as the Etudes d’exécution transcendante), the Schubert song arrangements, and the first batch of opera fantasies in the wake of what was to become a decade-long European tour. Even though Liszt rarely performed the Symphonie fantastique arrangement publicly during this period (and even then only a selected movement or two), the work is exemplary of a practice ascribed to Liszt by Searle, Walker, and many other commentators—namely, Liszt’s musical dissemination of works written by his musical heroes and contemporaries. Walker’s statement can be taken as representative: “His chief motive was to help the poverty-stricken Berlioz, whose symphony remained unknown and unpublished. Liszt bore the expense of printing his keyboard transcription himself, and he played it in public mainly to popularize the original score.”7 While certainly true to a degree, such accounts often reduce Liszt’s involvement to one of routine and passive promotion, a one-sided exchange whereby Berlioz benefits from Liszt’s toils. Moreover, they overlook the fundamental importance that arrangements played in shaping Liszt’s general artistic aesthetic as well as his compositional and literary endeavors during the 1830s and beyond. It is a testament to the biographical allure of the charitable arranger and performer that few scholars have ventured to explain exactly how Liszt performing his own reduction alongside the original could raise awareness of Berlioz’s full score. Instead, the inherited histories of the Liszt-Berlioz relationship and the Symphonie fantastique have helped shape a seemingly analytic truth about Liszt’s musical arrangements: Since we understand their chief role to be one of dissemination and by extension preservation, fidelity to the original work becomes its most prized feature. But transcriptions always document musical intersections, and pigeonholing Liszt’s keyboard arrangements as abstract paragons of musical reproduction often divorces them from—indeed, denies us— the milieu of their creation and early dissemination. Conceiving the history of Liszt’s Symphonie fantastique arrangement as a series of often independent reactions by its creators and auditors helps reveal a more complex history, one that involves two of the most important artists of the Romantic era. Correspondence as well as manuscript evidence sug7 Walker, Liszt: The Virtuoso Years, 180. Observations by Serge Gut (Franz Liszt [Paris: Éditions de Fallois/L’Age d’Homme, 1989], 37) and D. Kern Holoman (Berlioz [Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989], 110), penned around the same time as Walker’s biography, similarly restate Humphrey Searle’s formulation that “the purpose of the transcription was of course to help Berlioz at a time when he found it difficult to get orchestral performances of his works: Liszt not only played it in his own concerts, but actually bore the expenses of its publication, so that it could reach as wide a public as possible” (The Music of Liszt, 8).

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kregor gest that their collaboration extended well beyond the confines of the Symphony: Realizing the work for piano challenged Liszt to extend the possibilities of his technique, and marketing his transcription prompted publishers to create music that mediated between the virtuosic concert stage and the amateur’s domestic sphere. In this view, Liszt and his works constitute a virtual archive of contemporary artistic reception. Scrutinizing the Symphonie fantastique in conception, on stage, and in print means harnessing the mechanisms of composition, spectacle, and technology, and the result approaches a more nuanced understanding of Liszt’s most emblematic piano transcription.

Realization and Collaboration The transcription of the Symphonie fantastique came into being during one of the most remarkable periods of artistic growth in Liszt’s life and one of the most unstable in Berlioz’s, and it continues to be considered a linchpin—a project that inspired, solidified, and sustained their relationship during the 1830s and 1840s. Although ecstatic impressions from concertgoers like Hallé have tended to craft a modern bias of accomplishment in Liszt’s favor and downplay Berlioz’s role in its production, a broader view of the early history of the Symphonie fantastique —not only the transcription but also the full score—reveals an almost uninterrupted collaborative effort between the two artists. This high level of investment in each other’s work hardly diminished when Liszt published the Symphonie fantastique transcription in 1834, for his arrangements of Berlioz’s orchestral pieces from the second half of the 1830s, particularly that of the Ouverture des francs-juges, bear the fingerprints of a symbiotic relationship. Each continued to support the other with favorable reviews in an otherwise antagonistic French press, and by the late 1830s their joint concerts had already become legendary, especially to their audiences east of Paris. Indeed, it was Liszt, riding high on the heels of his own successes in Vienna and Pest, who finally persuaded Berlioz to undertake a German tour in the early 1840s. The move, which was to take their careers in opposite directions, exacted a heavy toll on their relationship. Efforts, sometimes spectacular, were made on both sides to overlook the growing chasm between their artistic preferences, but Liszt and Berlioz never fully recovered the spirit of artistic camaraderie they had so enjoyed in the 1830s. Few stories make for better biographical reading than that of the circumstances surrounding their first encounter. The 19-year-old pianist, in the wake of an aborted Symphonie révolutionnaire inspired by the July Revolution and living in relative isolation in Paris, met the brash Berlioz on the eve of the premiere of the latter’s controversial

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new Symphonie fantastique. As Berlioz would recall years later in his Mémoires (chap. 31), the two spoke of Goethe’s Faust and immediately realized that they shared the same artistic predispositions. Liszt heard the Symphony the next day and was so overcome by it that he dragged the 27-year-old French composer off to dinner for another round of discussion about literature, the arts, and the state of musical romanticism. Of course, there was talk of the Symphony too, and Liszt succeeded in convincing Berlioz that his new composition might profit from an outsider’s sympathetic ear. Indeed, it is usually overlooked that the first phase of their collaboration on the Symphonie fantastique seems to have begun almost immediately after its 5 December 1830 premiere, with the usually guarded Berlioz eagerly sharing his epic score with the pianist. His first surviving letter to Liszt vividly paints the enthusiasm that both artists shared at the prospect of this artistic alliance: “I have not been able to send you the score of my Symphony any sooner, for I am forced to keep the ‘Bal’ scene, which I am now arranging for piano. I am really afraid of abusing your time and kindness in asking you to look at the other movements. Believe me, sir, that I am filled with gratitude over the support that you have already so readily wanted to give me, along with the advice that you promise me—for me they are of inestimable value.”8 (By the next surviving letter, the two musicians are already addressing each other with the personal “tu” form.) If Berlioz arranged the second movement for piano toward the end of 1830, it is no longer extant, but the idea held currency for at least another two years.9 He did, however, re-work substantial portions of the Symphonie fantastique while in Italy during his Prix de Rome tenure, and a revised version was performed at the Conservatoire—again with an enthusiastic Liszt in the audience—on 9 December 1832 under FrançoisAntoine Habeneck’s baton.10 Although it has often been suggested that

8 C.G.I, 21 December 1830, p. 393. “Je n’ai pas pu envoyer plus tôt la partition de ma symphonie, encore je suis obligé de garder la scène du Bal que j’arrange pour le piano. Je crains bien d’abuser de votre temps et de votre complaisance en vous priant de vouloir bien les examiner; croyez, Monsieur, que je suis pénétré de reconnaissance pour les encouragements que vous avez bien voulu me donner déjà, et pour les conseils que vous me promettez; ils seront pour moi d’un prix inestimable.” 9 Letter of 19 January 1833 to Joseph d’Ortigue, in C.G.II, pp. 67–68. “Je n’ai pas besoin de vous dire qu’il ne faut pas songer à arranger le bas [= le bal ] à quatre mains.” Incidentally, this purported arrangement of the second movement is not the fragment of “Un bal” preserved in Berlioz’s hand located in the Musée Hector Berlioz at La CôteSaint-André. See Jérôme Dorival et al., eds., Catalogue des fonds musicaux conservés en Région Rhône-Alpes: Les manuscrits (1600–1870) (Lyon: Ardim, 1998), 1:111. 10 The most detailed account of the (sometimes substantial) changes that Berlioz made to his score between the 1830 and 1832 performances is D. Kern Holoman, The Creative Process in the Autograph Musical Documents of Hector Berlioz, c. 1818–1840 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1980), esp. 262–82. Thomas Forrest Kelly provides a succinct

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kregor this concert prompted Liszt to transcribe the work, it was actually the 2 May 1833 performance in the Hôtel de L’Europe littéraire in Paris that convinced him. (Significant for Liszt’s future performances of his transcription is the fact that only the second, third, and fourth movements were mounted.) An excited Liszt wrote to Marie d’Agoult that “last night I again heard . . . Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. Never has this work appeared so complete, so true. If I am not dead by the end of June, I will probably set it, arrange it for piano, regardless of whatever pain and difficulty this enterprise will cost me. I am certain that you will be more astonished by its reading than its execution.”11 Liszt’s final statement somewhat enigmatically conveys the novelties of his transcription. He would write Adolphe Pictet in 1838 that he was “the one who first proposed a new method of transcription in my piano score of the Symphonie fantastique. I applied myself as scrupulously as if I were translating a sacred text to transferring, not only the symphony’s musical framework, but also its detailed effects and the multiplicity of its instrumental and rhythmic combinations to the piano.”12 But Liszt was being too modest. His intention, as the May 1833 letter makes clear, was not merely to reproduce Berlioz’s music but to offer a nuanced recreation of a performance that brought together the originality of Berlioz’s composition with Liszt’s technical accomplishments. In effect, the goal of the “reading” was to draw attention to the elements that made Berlioz’s work so innovative by fusing notes with gestures. Liszt absorbed Berlioz’s orchestral performance into his own technique, creating a matrix that operated on several distinct hermeneutic levels. Example 1, from Liszt’s transcription of the slow introduction to the first movement, begins around the middle of the transition back to the “Estelle” theme.13 At measure 23, where the sustain pedal is noticeably summary of Holoman’s findings as well as some new material in his First Nights: Five Musical Premieres (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2000), 226–35. 11 Liszt/d’Agoult, 3 May 1833, p. 57. “J’ai réentendu hier soir, à la soirée de l’Europe littéraire, la Symphonie fantastique de Berlioz; jamais cette œuvre ne m’avait paru aussi complète, aussi vraie. Si je ne suis pas tué d’ici à la fin de Juin probablement je me mettrai à l’œuvre, je l’arrangerai pour piano, quelque peine et difficulté qu’il y ait à cette entreprise. Je suis persuadé que vous en serez encore plus étonnée à la lecture qu’à l’exécution.” 12 Franz Liszt, An Artist’s Journey: Lettres d’un bachelier ès musique, 1835–1841, ed. and trans. Charles Suttoni (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989), 46–47. 13 All relevant examples are taken from Maurice Schlesinger’s 1834 print of the Symphonie fantastique transcription (see Fig. 1). This edition is more germane to the following discussion, since many of the more characteristic performance markings do not make their way into the 1877 revised edition and therefore the Neue Liszt Ausgabe (II/16). For an examination of the editorial policies of the Neue Liszt Ausgabe as they affect the critical edition of the Symphonie fantastique arrangement, see Jay Rosenblatt, review of “Transkriptionen I: Transkriptionen der Werke von Hector Berlioz,” Notes 53 (1997): 1313–16.

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the journal of musicology example 1. Symphonie fantastique, “Rêveries, passions,” mm. 22–25, Liszt arrangement ritar

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kregor absent, the pianist is forced to contort the right hand into uncomfortable positions in order to maintain the integrity of the three voices. In the next measure the winds enter with their main melody; and as the texture thickens considerably, the demands on the pianist recede. Thus the welcome arrival of a more subdued, settled theme at measure 24 is reflected in Liszt’s arrangement by the analogous technical relief. Liszt’s detailed setting of the work—neatly encapsulated under the concept of what he called a partition de piano —provides a visual component to the action of Berlioz’s Symphony as it serves to guide the auditor and highlight important formal junctures. But there are also analytic elements etched into Liszt’s reading of Berlioz’s score. His treatment of the idée fixe in the first three movements provides one of the more noticeable examples. Schumann wrote that this “principal motive to the Symphony is by itself neither pretty nor suitable for contrapuntal treatment, but it improves more and more on acquaintance through its later appearances.”14 Liszt encourages this acquaintance by fashioning accompaniments of the idée fixe (see Exs. 2a–c) that begin to resemble one another over the course of the first three movements. Much to the detriment of the pianist’s left hand, Liszt reduces Berlioz’s full score almost note for note in the first movement. (The violent manner in which the pianist must execute the treacherous downward leaps of m. 84ff creates an even clearer profile for the idée fixe.) In the second movement, the shimmering tremolo accompaniment is routinely punctuated with left-hand leaps of a 10th or 11th— that is, one octave more than Berlioz calls for in his score. Note here that Liszt does not double both the A and F or E and C in measure 123 —it is the leaping figure that he wishes to highlight. This motive heralds the arrival of the idée fixe in the next movement at measure 87, and it is the first sound heard in the left hand as each phrase of the beloved’s melody emerges from its recitative-like state (see mm. 91 and 95). To be sure, Berlioz provided the initial figurations for Liszt’s reading, but it fell to the pianist to draw greater attention to their consistent profile. It is little wonder, then, that his earliest mature works—for example the first versions of the “Dante” Sonata or the “Vallée d’Obermann”—are built on similar foundations of motivic unity. These readings came rather quickly to Liszt, for he completed the transcription in fewer than four months. The process was by no means easy. On 30 August 1833, as Liszt was adding the finishing touches, he entreated d’Agoult to “say three ‘Our Fathers’ and three ‘Hail Marys’ 14 “Phantastische Symphonie,” NZfM 3/11 (7 August 1835): 43. “Das Hauptmotiv zur Symphonie, an sich weder schön, noch zur contrapunctischen Arbeit geeignet, gewinnt immer mehr surch die späteren Stellungen.”

203

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the journal of musicology example 2a. Symphonie fantastique, “Rêveries, passions,” mm. 72–86, Liszt arrangement

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kregor example 2c. Symphonie fantastique, “Scène aux champs,” mm. 90–95, Liszt arrangement

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for its benefit.”15 Her prayers must have been answered, for on the same day Berlioz wrote to Humbert Ferrand that “Liszt has just arranged 15 Liszt/d’Agoult, 30 August 1833, p. 84. “La Symphonie fantastique sera terminée dimanche soir; dites trois Pater et trois Ave en son intention.”

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my symphony for piano—it is astonishing.”16 But Berlioz was still reporting on the novelty of the transcription to Ferrand almost two months later, writing that “Liszt has just reduced my entire Symphonie for piano” and that it will soon be engraved.17 Berlioz’s repetitious comments suggest either that Liszt did not complete all five movements of the transcription by the end of August 1833 or that he revised them in September and October. (No autograph manuscript of any portion of the transcription before the 1860s has been located.) Perhaps the thought of publishing the work necessitated a thorough revision, but Liszt just as easily may have been readying the transcription for its private premiere in d’Agoult’s salon. In her Mémoires she recalls that “at my places in both Paris and in the countryside, the 1833–1834 season offered good music. New compositions of the musical Romanticism were played, [including] Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique arranged for the piano by Liszt.”18 Introducing demanding new works in an intimate venue was not unique for Liszt, who preferred throughout his concert years to premiere works by his contemporaries outside the concert hall. For example, in 1839 he wrote to Robert Schumann of his enthusiasm for playing Carnaval, the Davidsbündlertänze, and the Kinderscenen for the Viennese public yet was reluctant to introduce the Kreisleriana and the Fantasy in C. In Liszt’s eyes, the former were readily accessible to an audience, whereas the latter were “more difficult for the public to digest—I shall save them for later.”19 Liszt’s performance of the Fantasy, for example, likely took place behind closed doors during his visit to Leipzig in 1840. With a successful private premiere already behind it, the transcription of the Symphonie fantastique was engraved by May 1834 at the latest. Both Liszt and Berlioz checked the proofs, a process that initially did not seem to pose many difficulties. Liszt, whose concert activities before late 1834 were sporadic, hoped to precede his arrival on the public stage with a spectacular showing in the marketplace. He relates to d’Agoult 16 C.G.II, 30 August 1833, p. 113. “Liszt vient d’arranger ma symphonie pour le piano; c’est étonnant.” 17 C.G.II, 25 October 1833, p. 128. “Liszt vient de réduire pour le piano seul la Symphonie entière.” 18 Marie d’Agoult/Daniel Stern, Mémoires, souvenirs et journaux de la Comtesse d’Agoult (Daniel Stern), ed. Charles F. Dupêchez (Paris: Mercure de France, 1990), 1:264. “Pendant une saison, . . . [on] faisait aussi chez moi, à Paris et à la campagne, de bonne musique; on y jouait les compositions nouvelles du romantisme musical: La Symphonie fantastique de Berlioz, arrangée pour le piano par Liszt.” Dupêchez bases the date of this season on unpublished letters by d’Agoult from August and September 1833 (see pp. 413–14). 19 Letter of 5 June 1839 in Franz Liszt, Briefe, ed. La Mara (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1893–1905), 1:27. “En attendant je compte jouer en public votre Carnaval, quelquesuns des Davidsbündlertänze et des Kinderscenen. Le Kreisleriana et la Fantaisie qui m’est dédiée, sont de digestion plus difficile pour le public—je les réserverai pour plus tard.”

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kregor that “I will not write anything for a month, as a number of corrections here have to be taken care of. By the beginning of winter I shall have seven or eight pieces engraved.”20 The transcription, in fact, was to be his magnum opus, the apotheosis of a half-decade of self-regulated study of the masters: Liszt proudly informed his student Valérie Boissier of its imminent arrival in mid summer 1834 that “in two weeks I shall have the honor of sending you the first copy of the Symphonie fantastique. With it you will then have a collection of rather large things.”21 Rumors of a transcription of Berlioz’s Symphony by Liszt reached Germany around the time of his letter to Boissier. An anonymous “Brief aus Paris” informed readers of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik that “the most amazing difficulties are but child’s play to Liszt. He sight-reads everything, dexterously and instantly, with such an artifice and perfection that anyone else might only be able to pick out were he to spend endless hours practicing. The reader can glean an idea of his playing by procuring his four-hand arrangement of a symphony by Berlioz that will appear shortly at [Maurice] Schlesinger’s.”22 The source of this

Liszt/d’Agoult, 1 May 1834, p. 128. “Je n’écrirai point avant un mois–il me faudra faire une quantité de corrections d’ici là au commencement de l’hiver j’aurai 7 à 8 Œuvres de gravées.” Berlioz explains to Ferrand around the middle of the month (C.G.II, p. 184) that “the Symphony has been engraved and we are correcting the proofs, but it will not appear until Liszt returns from Normandy, where he will spend four or five weeks” (“La Symphonie est gravée nous corrigeons les épreuves, mais elle ne paraîtra pas avant le retour de Liszt, qui vient de partir pour la Normandie, où il passera quatre ou cinq semaines”). 21 Letter of June 1834 in Robert Bory, “Diverses lettres inédites de Liszt,” Schweizerisches Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft 3 (1928): 64. “J’aurai l’honneur de vous envoyer le Ier exemplaire de la Symphonie fantastique dans une quinzaine; puis, vous aurez successivement une quantité d’assez grosses choses.” Bory suggested the date of this letter as “Spring 1834,” but Adrian Williams (ed. and trans., Franz Liszt: Selected Letters [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998], 28–29) has been able to narrow the date down to late June or early July 1834. 22 NZfM 1/18 (2 June 1834): 72. “Ihm [Liszt] sind die tollsten Schwierigkeiten Kinderspiele, er spielt vom Blatt Alles sogleich ganz fertig, mit allen Künsten, mit allen Vollkommenheiten, die er [sic; should probably read “ein Anderer”] nach langem Ueben desselben Stücks nur würde herausklauben können. Sie werden eine ungefähre Idee von seinem Spiel erlangen, wenn Sie eine Symphonie von Berlioz, die er vierhändig arrangirt hat, und die binnen kurzem bei Schlesinger hier erscheinen wird, zu Gesicht bekommen werden.” It is possible that the author is Heinrich Panofka, the Parisian-based music teacher and critic who worked for the Gazette et revue musicale, acted as a correspondent for the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, and was a strong supporter of Berlioz’s. It is understandable that the correspondent assumes a four-hand transcription, which was by far the most popular keyboard medium during the 19th century. See Helmut Loos, Zur Klavierübertragung von Werken für und mit Orchester des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Munich and Salzburg: Emil Katzbichler, 1983), 8; and Thomas Christensen, “FourHand Piano Transcription and Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Musical Reception,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 52 (1999): 258–89. Given this musical climate, Liszt’s solo transcription of Berlioz’s First Symphony becomes all the more unusual. 20

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report is unclear, and though it is dubious in several respects (how can one get a sense of Liszt’s technique by playing through a four-hand transcription?), it nevertheless represents the first mention of the work outside private correspondence. More important is the way in which the author here appropriates the Symphonie fantastique transcription to frame Liszt’s celebrated technique. Indeed, the report seems to corroborate Liszt’s statement that his Berlioz arrangement defines him better musically than any other work he has thus far produced. Schumann agreed, and like the anonymous Parisian correspondent similarly highlighted the educational benefits that Liszt’s transcription could provide aspiring pianists. “Liszt,” he wrote toward the end of his long review, “has applied so much industry, enthusiasm, and genius that the result, like an original work summarizing his profound studies, must be considered as a practical method of instruction in playing a score at the piano.”23 Schumann’s formulation, of course, precisely sums up the most important elements of a successful musical reproduction, but since Schumann had never seen Liszt or Berlioz, he could not appreciate just how skillfully Liszt’s piano score recreated the dynamics of performance. Instead, the symphonic ambition of Liszt’s arrangement offered Schumann new solutions to his own works, as Carnaval, the Etudes symphoniques, and the Piano Sonata, op. 11, were all in progress by the summer of 1834. And Schumann’s great Fantasy in C major, which appeared in April 1839 with a dedication to Liszt, takes the symphonic ambition of the Symphonie fantastique arrangement to one of its most refined levels. For example, a likely model for measures 35–41 from the second movement of Schumann’s work—which requires hand crossing, demands crisp articulation, and registrally expands from out to in and then back out (> ).24 23 Translation modified from Berlioz, Fantastic Symphony, ed. Cone, 244. The original (NZfM 3/12 [11 August 1835]: 47) reads: “Liszt hat [den Clavierauszug] mit so viel Fleiß, Begeisterung und Genie ausgearbeitet, daß er wie ein Originalwerk, ein Resümee seiner tiefen Studien, als praktische Clavierschule im Partiturspiel angesehen werden muß.” 24 Theo Hirsbrunner has documented several textural parallels between Schumann’s Fantasy and Liszt’s arrangement, suggesting that “doch kennt er [Schumann] auch subtilere Töne, die aber wieder wie die Übertragung aus einem Orchesterstück anmuten” (Hirsbrunner, “Schumann und Berlioz,” in Hector Berlioz: Ein Franzose in Deutschland, eds. Matthias Brzoska, Hermann Hofer, and Nicole K. Strohmann [Laaber: LaaberVerlag, 2005], 56.). Indeed, Hirsbrunner would have found even more parallels between the two works had he made use of the Schlesinger print from 1834 rather than drawing upon examples found in the Neue Liszt Ausgabe or the revised 1877 print.

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kregor Liszt’s arrangement would have been available to Schumann toward the end of November, for its publisher Maurice Schlesinger advertised the work for the first time in his Gazette musicale de Paris on 9 November 1834.25 A week earlier, Schlesinger had announced an upcoming concert by Berlioz that would feature a version of the Symphonie fantastique to which “M. Berlioz has added several new orchestral effects to his work that noticeably increase its brilliance.”26 This type of multifaceted advertising campaign was typical for the business-savvy Schlesinger, and for much of the following decade the fate of the printed work would be closely allied with that of the performed work. * * * This unusually close relationship on stage and in print was hardly spontaneous. From conception to publication, the early course of the Symphonie fantastique transcription had been navigated by both Berlioz and Liszt. The correspondence of the two composers harbors many details that shed further light on the intricacies of the work’s genesis. Liszt reviewed Berlioz’s full score shortly after the work’s premiere, perhaps even offering advice to Berlioz as to how it might be improved. And while there is no evidence to suggest that Berlioz incorporated Liszt’s recommendations (whatever they may have been) into later versions of his work, Berlioz does note in his Mémoires (chap. 31) that the third movement made no impression on his audience at the premiere and that he resolved to rewrite it immediately. Berlioz was still modifying the full score when Liszt began transcribing the work in May 1833, and would continue to do so for the next decade. Indeed, it is often overlooked that Liszt’s arrangement bears witness to a version of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique that no longer exists, or at least is no longer performed with any regularity. Berlioz’s 25 See the Gazette musicale de Paris 1/45 (9 November 1834): 364, where the work is listed as “Musique nouvelle, | Publiée par Maurice Schlesinger. | Épisode de la Vie d’un Artiste, | Simphonie fantastique en cinq parties, par Berlioz, arrangée | pour le piano par | LISZT. | Prix net 20 fr.” Berlioz writes to Humbert Ferrand on 30 November 1834 (C.G.II, p. 208) that “the Symphonie fantastique has appeared, but since Liszt has invested a huge amount of money in its publication, we, along with Schlesinger, have decided not to allow a single copy to be given away” (“La Symphonie Fantastique a paru; mais, comme ce pauvre Liszt a dépensé horriblement d’argent pour cette publication, nous sommes convenus avec Schlesinger de ne pas consentir à ce qu’il donne un seul exemplaire.”). Indeed, it seems that Liszt’s partition was not released until the end of the month, for an announcement in the Gazette musicale de Paris on 30 November (p. 388) states that “La grande symphonie fantastique de Hector Berlioz en partition de piano, arrangée par Liszt, vient de paraître. Nous rendrons compte de cette importante publication.” 26 “Nouvelles,” Gazette musicale de Paris 1/44 (2 November 1834): 356. “M. Berlioz a ajouté à son ouvrage plusiers effets d’orchestre nouveaux qui en augmenteront sensiblement l’éclat.”

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initial programs for the second movement, for instance, explained that “The artist finds himself in the most varied of life’s situations—at the center of a rousing party, in the peaceful contemplation of nature’s beauties; but everywhere—in town, in the country—the dear image appears before him, throwing his mind into a troubled state.”27 Indeed, the first appearance of the idée fixe in the second movement of Liszt’s arrangement (Ex. 3)28—the beloved’s apparition to the artist among a sea of partygoers—is a striking tableau of the protagonist’s mental condition. The beloved’s theme maintains the regular three count of the nearby waltz, but the accompaniment operates in spasmodic two-beat pulses. This hocket effect is further distinguished by a sudden reduction in the orchestral scoring, with the accompaniment given over to a handful of plaintive strings that snake throughout the upper registers. Thus with all musical action coming to a grinding halt, the awkwardness of the artist’s situation becomes the focal point of the movement. Berlioz smoothed over the jarring lines of this scene when he carried out one of his many revisions sometime after 1834, replacing the metrical dissonances with fragments of the waltz motive in the strings. And he would eventually reduce the psychological impact of this musical event by similarly streamlining the plot of the entire movement: “[The artist] encounters the loved one at a dance,” Berlioz now envisions, “in the midst of the tumult of a brilliant party.”29 (The pianist Idil Biret, in what is one of the earliest recordings of Liszt’s transcription committed to compact disc, incorporates Berlioz’s later revisions of these measures into her interpretation, creating a product that does not correspond to any published version.)30 D. Kern Holoman, in his study of Berlioz’s autograph manuscripts, notes that Liszt’s piano score diverges from Berlioz’s published orchestral score in several minor spots as well. Berlioz, Holoman opines, may have been inspired by some of the solutions Liszt put forth in his 27 As it reads in the program included with Liszt’s arrangement: “L’artiste est placé dans les circonstances de la vie les plus diverses; au milieu du tumulte d’une fête, dans la paisible contemplation des beautés de la nature; mais partout, à la ville, aux champs, l’image chérie vient se présenter à lui et jeter le trouble dans son âme.” 28 The full score of this passage is included in Hector Berlioz, Symphonie fantastique (vol. 16 of Hector Berlioz: New Edition of the Complete Works), ed. Nicholas Temperley (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1972), 198. 29 As it reads in the program included in Berlioz, Fantastic Symphony, ed. Cone, 32– 33. “Il retrouve l’aimée dans un bal au milieu du tumulte d’une fête brillante.” 30 See Franz Liszt, Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique (Piano Transcription), Idil Biret, piano (Naxos 8.550725 [1992]), track 2, 2
05–2
27. Biret is perhaps the first modern pianist to have performed Liszt’s transcription in its entirety. See her recording of the work, Symphonie Fantastique. Solo Piano Version by Franz Liszt (Finnadar SR 9023 [1979]). Leslie Howard’s recording of the same composition (Hyperion CDA66433 [1991]) preserves a reading very close to that of the new Liszt critical edition.

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kregor example 3. Symphonie fantastique, “Un bal,” mm. 131–46, Liszt arrangement

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arrangement when Berlioz revised his orchestral score sometime in the later 1830s. Most notable is the first occurrence in Liszt’s edition of the “consolations religieuses” in the accompanying program at the end of the first movement, the musical analogue of which coincidentally lends itself well to piano reduction.31 But although Holoman suggests that the addition was probably incorporated at the last minute, the first edition issued by Maurice Schlesinger in November 1834—which was subsequently reprinted in 1836 with only cosmetic changes to the music —gives no indication that this passage was engraved hastily.32 Holoman, The Creative Process, 275–76. The coda begins on the fourth system of page 22 of Schlesinger’s edition. If Schlesinger had added the section at the last minute, either the preceding pages would be excessively cramped or the final page of the movement would be unusually bare. Thomas Forrest Kelly believes that the addition took place at the very beginning of December 1830, perhaps only a day or two before the work’s premiere. See First Nights, 227. 31 32

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Quite the opposite, in fact. Liszt and Berlioz actually spent about as much time correcting proofs—at least three months—as Liszt did in making his initial transcription of the entire work. The crestfallen pianist reports to Marie d’Agoult in July 1834 that “the fourth proof [Liszt’s emphasis] of Berlioz’s Symphony is giving me a headache. It really is a terrible undertaking.”33 That Schlesinger, who was notorious for running a tight ship with his journal and musical offerings in the 1830s, would acquiesce to such delays is surprising. Indeed, the timeline suggests that changes from proof to proof were more than merely cosmetic. Although the type of collaboration demonstrated by Liszt and Berlioz is rare in music-making from this period, the art historian Stephen Bann reminds us that it is was ubiquitous in the world of the visual arts. Painters and printmakers, including the Parisian engraver Luigi Calamatta, whom Liszt knew intimately, often worked side by side in the same studio, particularly when it came to applying the finishing touches: Bann writes that “These painters (no doubt in varying degrees) adapted to considering their works in the light of their possible reproduction, and, at the same time, in the light of the practical arrangements for their marketing.”34 Two heads were of course better than one for catching slips of the pen and working out last-minute compositional problems, but this collaboration yielded more substantial dividends as well. The care with which Liszt and Berlioz prepared the piano score of the Symphonie fantastique is also evident in Liszt’s piano solo arrangements of Berlioz’s Ouverture des francs-juges and Ouverture du roi Lear, both of which date from the second half of the 1830s.35 Liszt’s esteem for Berlioz had hardly abated when Joseph d’Ortigue’s biography of the pianist appeared in 1835 in the pages of Maurice Schlesinger’s Gazette musicale de

33 Liszt/d’Agoult, 7 July 1834, p. 161. “J’ai la tête cassée de la 4me épreuve de la Symph[onie] Berlioz. Décidément c’est une chose monstrueuse.” 34 Stephen Bann, Parallel Lines: Printmakers, Painters and Photographers in NineteenthCentury France (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2001), 6. 35 The sources are imprecise regarding the dating of these overtures. When Lina Ramann (Lisztiana: Erinnerungen an Franz Liszt in Tagebuchblättern, Briefen und Dokumenten aus den Jahren 1873–1886/87, ed. Arthur Seidl, rev. Friedrich Schnapp [Mainz: Schott, 1983], 403) questioned Liszt about the dates of their creation in a December 1875 Fragezettel, he responded that they both came about “during my Swiss trip, [18]35.” However, Berlioz writes Liszt (C.G.II, p. 282) on 25 January 1836 that “Je ne sais comment t’envoyer les deux partitions que tu me demandes.” A couple of months later Liszt requests his mother to “Demander à Berlioz de ma part de vous remettre la Partition de la Symphonie d’Harold et de son Ouverture du roi Lear,” suggesting that at least one of the overtures had yet to be arranged (see Franz Liszt, Briefwechsel mit seiner Mutter, ed. Klára Hamburger [Eisenstadt: Burgenländische Landesregierung, 2000], 99). Indeed, Berlioz requests of Liszt (C.G.II, p. 348) on 22 May 1837 that “Si tu en as le temps, arrange donc l’ouverture du Roi Lear.”

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kregor Paris. D’Ortigue, whom Liszt supplied with numerous personal anecdotes and information found nowhere else, wrote that Berlioz was a vision for the pianist, a figure whose influence by far eclipsed that of Chopin or Mendelssohn.36 Liszt continued to demonstrate admiration for his older colleague by publishing his arrangement of the Francsjuges overture in 1845, and a heretofore unknown fragment of an autograph from about 1837 suggests that the arrangement went through multiple iterations in the 1830s.37 The music of this earlier version (see Ex. 4) is fully written out, complete with ossia (not reproduced here), and it diverges in several places from the published edition, most notably by the inclusion of the “piano” direction at measure 118 and a different reading of the inner voice at measure 129. To be sure, differences between fragment and print are slight, but the fragment’s reading better reflects that of Berlioz’s full score, which had been published in 1836. Liszt may have decided to revise these measures for the sake of clarity: The frequent hand crossing in this reading can make for a clumsy performance, particularly if the pianist hopes to achieve a rendering even remotely close to Berlioz’s astonishingly fast tempo direction of
= 80. Like his arrangement of the Symphonie fantastique, Liszt’s Ouverture du roi Lear fixes a reading of Berlioz’s work that is no longer performed today. Although there is less documentary evidence, it is reasonable to assume that the process of its creation unfolded in a manner similar to that of the Symphonie fantastique. Liszt completed his arrangement by February 1838 at the latest, and Berlioz continued to revise his orchestral score until the publication of the parts in 1839.38 (Liszt’s arrangement remained unpublished until 1987.)39 And as he had with the arrangement of the Symphonie fantastique, Berlioz kept close tabs on

36 Joseph d’Ortigue, “Études biographiques. I. Franz Listz [sic],” Gazette musicale de Paris 2/24 (14 June 1835): 202. “C’est dans le même esprit qu’il étudie les qualités distinctives des jeunes artistes ses amis: Chopin, Hiller, Mendelshon, Dessauer, Urhan, V. Alkan, Berlioz qui a été pour lui une apparition.” 37 This fragment appears to be the only holograph of Liszt’s Ouverture des Francsjuges arrangement and is found on the underside of a collette on p. 16, systems 2–3 of D-WRgs, GSA 60/U 57, Liszt’s arrangement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony (first version). The paper of the collette matches that of U 57 (see Rena Charnin Mueller, “Liszt’s ‘Tasso’ Sketchbook: Studies in Sources and Revisions” [Ph.D. diss., New York Univ., 1986], 366; and Jay Michael Rosenblatt, “The Concerto as Crucible: Franz Liszt’s Early Works for Piano and Orchestra” [Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Chicago, 1995], 452). The terminus ad quem of the work and the fragment must be 1840, the year in which Liszt published his Beethoven Seventh arrangement with Tobias Haslinger in Vienna. 38 See Berlioz’s letter of 8 February 1838 to Liszt in C.G.II, 412. 39 The first edition of this transcription does not evaluate the compositional phases evident in the autograph manuscript. See Hector Berlioz, Overture to King Lear. Transcription for Pianoforte Solo by F. Liszt, ed. Ken Souter (London: Liszt Society Publications, 1987).

213

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the journal of musicology example 4. Ouverture des francs-juges, earlier version of mm. 116–34, Liszt arrangement. Underside of collette on D-WRgs, GSA 60/U 57, p. 161

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¼ ¹ Ł Ł ý Ł ÐÐ ý Ł ŁŁ Ł Ł Ł ¼ ðð Ł ð Ł ðð Ł ŁŁŁ Ł ¼ Ł ¼ Ł ¼ Ł Ł Ł

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Łý Ł Łý Ł Łý Ł Łý Ł ðð ŁŁ ŁŁ   ŁŁ Ł Ł Ł ¼ Ł ¼ Ł ýý ð ŁŁ ŁŁ ýý Ł Ł Ł Ł  
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ðý − ¼ ŁŁ Š − −− ŁŁ ¹ ŁŁ ŁŁ ýý ŁŁ Ð ððð ŁŁŁ ŁŁŁŁ ý ŁŁ ŁŁ ýý ŁŁ ð ý ððð ŁŁ ¼ ¼ ðð ŁŁ Ł ðð Ł Ł Ý −− − Ł ð Ł Ł Ł ¼ Ł Ł ¼ Ł − Ł ¼ Ł ¼ Ł ¼ Ł ¼ Ł Ł ¼ Ł ¼ Ł Ł

131

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dolce e legato

ð ð

1

The E  at m. 123, r.h., has been crossed out by Liszt.

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kregor example 5. Ouverture des roi Lear, earlier version of mm. 164–68, Liszt arrangement. Below collette on D-WRgs, GSA 60/U 43, p. 102

[

ð Š Łðð Ł Ł Ł Ł

164

[ Ý]

]

−Ð ðý ð ²Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł − Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ² Ł Ł
 ðð  rit ² ÐÐ Ð []

¼ ð ²Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ²Ł Ł Ł Ł Š

167

Ý

[ ]

Ł
Ł
Ł
ŁŁŁ Ł
ŁŁ Ł ŁŁ Ł Ł Ł  ŁŁ Ł Ł ŁŁŁ

2 Bracketed portions are unreadable (due to the wax) and have been extrapolated based on surrounding material.

Liszt’s work, offering suggestions for improving the reading of the coda as late as 1853.40 The autograph of the Roi Lear overture, housed in the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv in Weimar, resembles the Francs-juges overture in revealing several layers of revisions. Among the numerous changes in the manuscript, one of the most interesting is an early reading of measures 164–68 (see Ex. 5).41 This passage radically shifts the balance of the entire work and is particularly noticeable in performance. With its alternation of thumbs to provide momentum in the inner voice, the passage visually parallels those of measure 275ff and 402ff, and all three passages can be heard as transitional sections: Measures 164–68 begin the buildup of tension that is released with the more lyrical theme at measures 179ff; measures 275ff grow in force until the recapitulation at measure 305; and measures 402ff lead into the march-like theme at 40 In his letter of April 1853 to Liszt (C.G.IV, pp. 314–15), Berlioz disagreed with the pianist’s decision to substitute three triplet quarter notes for Berlioz’s four eighth notes. 41 This reading is covered by a collette on page 10, staves 1–2 of D-WRgs, GSA 60/ U 43. Beginning at m. 617, Liszt’s arrangement also contains a substantially different ending than Berlioz’s published full score. N.B.: All measure numbers refer to Liszt’s arrangement, which deviates from Berlioz’s score by one measure beginning at m. 85.

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measure 412. Liszt had written in 1836, the very period in which he was arranging Berlioz’s overtures and Harold Symphony, that “genius is the majesty of the new, the spirit creating its own form, the feeling of the infinite manifesting itself in the finite. Now, in which musical works do we find a higher level of innovative daring, depth of thought, and richness of forms than in Harold and the Episode de la vie d’un artiste?”42 Liszt made an equally strong case for Berlioz’s musical radicalism in his transcriptions: By reinforcing Berlioz’s formal structures through additional transitional figures such as those found in the Ouverture du roi Lear (and, as we shall see, the Symphonie fantastique), Liszt was merely giving evidence in music for what he had suggested in print. Even before he had completed his first batch of transcriptions, Liszt began seeking out a publisher. In December 1837 he contacted Berlioz with an offer: “If your intention is to publish [my arrangement of Harold en Italie] and the two overtures, [Friedrich] Hofmeister in Leipzig is paying me six francs per page for everything I send him. That would amount to about six hundred francs.”43 After failing to secure a publisher in Paris, Berlioz told Liszt to “do the negotiations yourself—I know you have my best interests at heart.”44 Although the publishing venture ultimately fell through, the close collaboration that the two artists had shared in private would frequently spill out onto the concert stage beginning in the second half of the 1830s and continuing well into the next decade. The Symphonie fantastique, however, would play only a marginal role.

42 Franz Liszt, Frühe Schriften, ed. Rainer Kleinertz (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 2000), 332. “Le génie, c’est la grandeur dans la nouveauté; le génie, c’est la pensée, se créant sa forme; c’est le sentiment de l’infini se manifestant dans le fini. Or, dans quelles œuvres musicales trouverons-nous à un plus haut degré la hardiesse de l’innovation, la profondeur de la pensée et la richesse de formes que dans Harold et l’Episode de la vie d’un artiste?” The original article, ostensibly written as a review of Berlioz’s 4 December 1836 concert in Paris, was first published as “Concert de M. Berlioz,” in Le Monde on 11 December 1836. 43 Letter of December 1837 from Liszt to Berlioz in C.G.II, pp. 387–88. “Tu recevras d’ici à peu l’arrangement de piano de ta seconde symphonie. Si ton intention était de la livrer au public (ainsi que les ouvertures des Francs-Juges et du Roi Lear), Hoffmeister à Leipzig, me paye 6 francs par page pour tout ce que je lui envoie. Ce serait par conséquent environ 600 francs.” In fact, Liszt had been in contact with several publishers, including Hofmeister, in an attempt to publish his own original compositions. See Liszt’s letter to Ignaz Moscheles of 28 December 1837 in Hans Rudolf Jung, ed., Franz Liszt in seinen Briefen: eine Auswahl (Berlin: Henschelverg Kunst und Gesellschaft, 1987), 64–66. 44 Letter of 8 February 1838 from Berlioz to Liszt in C.G.II, p. 412. “J’ai parlé à Richault de la gravure de mes deux ouvertures que tu as réduites pour le piano, il ne s’en soucie pas; pour la symphonie, si Hoffmeister veut m’en donner un prix raisonnable je ne demande pas mieux que de la lui laisser publier, ainsi que les deux autres manuscrits que tu m’as envoyés; fais la négociation toit-même, je te confie mes intérêts absolument.”

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kregor Content and Reaction Over the next 45 years, Liszt created two arrangements of the complete Symphonie fantastique for piano solo as well as an independent arrangement of the “Marche au supplice” (see Fig. 1). Alongside this enterprise he reduced sections of Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini and La Damnation de Faust, continued to tinker with his early arrangements of Berlioz’s two overtures, and diligently—if sporadically—worked to perfect his reduction of the Harold Symphony for viola solo and piano.45 (Liszt apparently also transcribed the Carnaval romain overture, but it was not published and the manuscript is no longer extant.) Many of these later arrangements were carried out during the final years of Liszt’s tenure at Weimar, and thus their raison d’être is far removed from the intense period of creativity and camaraderie that took place between the two composers in the aftermath of the July Revolution. Perhaps the biggest transformation to come over Liszt between these two phases of involvement with Berlioz’s music had less to do with composition and almost everything to do with performance. Indeed, sandwiched between the early 1830s and the 1850s was Liszt’s Virtuosenzeit, the years in which Liszt rose to become Europe’s top pianist and showman. He began his concert career in earnest almost immediately after putting the finishing touches on the Symphonie fantastique transcription, emerging in late 1834 from the relative isolation—and safety —of salon entertainments to enter the public performing world in force. To be sure, Liszt had given concerts to large audiences prior to 1834, but the frequency of his appearances and the virtuosity of his offerings increased dramatically. For some time, as he famously related to Pierre Wolff, he had “been working his mind and fingers like two wayward spirits,” and he wanted to demonstrate to the world just how far he had come as both savant and musician.46 By 1838 he had been able to catapult himself onto the European main stage with relative ease, and he maintained his preeminence over a sea of instrumental and vocal virtuosos for a decade. But the effects of “Lisztomania,” as Heinrich Heine would call it in 1844, gradually distanced Liszt’s output from his earlier collaborative pieces. As he assumed the role of the top virtuoso, his musical catalogue increasingly came to mirror those of his competitors: In the second half 45 The Symphonie fantastique is no exception to Liszt’s usual methods of composing, revising, and—often—revising and republishing yet again. Mueller succinctly sums up the difficulty of assessing Liszt’s works based on the often large paper trail that such reworkings create in “Reevaluating the Liszt Chronology: The Case of ‘Anfangs wollt ich fast verzagen’,” 19th-Century Music 12 (1988): 147. 46 Letter of 2 May 1832, in Liszt, Briefe, 1:6. “Voici quinze jours que mon esprit et mes doigts travaillent comme deux damnés.”

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the journal of musicology figure 1. Print genealogy of Liszt’s arrangement of the Symphonie fantastique, 1834–77 Nov. 1834:

“Advanced” edition, complete Schlesinger Paris (no plate number)

c.1836:

1st edition, complete Schlesinger Paris (“M.S.1982”) “Marche” Schlesinger Paris (“M.S.1982”)

early 1838:

218

Complete Trentsensky and Vieweg Vienna (“T.etV.2824”)

“Un bal” Schlesinger Paris (“M.S.1982”)

“Marche” Schlesinger Berlin (“S.2224”)

c.1842:

“Un bal” Schlesinger Berlin (“S.2677.A”)

early 1843: “Marche” [arr. Mockwitz] Schlesinger Berlin (“S.2817”) 1843/44:

1866:

1877:

Complete A. O. Witzendorf Vienna (“A.O.W.2824”) KEY: Reprint

“Marche” [rev. Liszt] J. Rieter-Biedermann Leipzig & Winterthur (“466”)

New engraving New edition 2nd edition, complete Constantin Sander Leipzig (“F.E.C.L.2893”)

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kregor of the 1830s, operatic fantasies and shorter pieces based on dance forms would eclipse his orchestral reductions. His concert programs shrank in variety, and earlier pieces like his Symphonie fantastique, the exploratory Apparitions, or the one-movement Harmonies poétiques et religieuses were heard less frequently, if at all. With such pressure to please his audience, by what means could Liszt transport his intimate association with Berlioz of the last half decade onto the concert stage? How could he mediate the inherently collaborative qualities of the Symphonie fantastique? Even though Liszt strove to make his arrangements playable, it was quite rare that one of his Berlioz partitions was mounted in the concert hall. The ubiquity of Hallé’s reminiscence gives the impression that the Symphonie fantastique transcription formed a staple of Liszt’s concert repertoire. And yet, although a complete performance calendar of Liszt’s concert years is far from complete, current data suggest that Liszt performed the Symphonie fantastique only four times in public.47 (Liszt never publicly performed the overtures.) And as Table 1 demonstrates, three out of the four performances were given in Paris, to an audience that already would have been intimately familiar with Berlioz’s original. Liszt’s performance of two movements of the work at Vienna on 25 May 1838 for his Abschiedskonzert effectively inaugurated his years as an independent virtuoso artist, while simultaneously offering a symbolic farewell to Berlioz and the heady artistic relationship from which they both had profited for several years. In the fall of 1834, Liszt was still very much artistically allied with— indeed, dependent on—Berlioz. The successes and failures of one often had a corresponding impact on the other. Liszt’s Parisian rise necessitated a trifecta of support in the publishing community, the press, and the concert hall. Whereas the pianist constantly negotiated—sometimes fought—with publishers for exposure in print, Berlioz was able to supply both with an accommodating voice in the press and space on the concert stage, even if on more than one occasion he was forced to conceal his true feelings from the public.48 The older colleague’s review of the pianist’s rendition of Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” sonata on 47 Owing to their number, Liszt’s concerts have been investigated geographically. See Geraldine Keeling, “Liszt’s Appearances in Parisian Concerts, 1824–1844,” The Liszt Society Journal 11 (1986): 22–34, and 12 (1987): 8–22; Malou Haine, “La première tournée de concerts de Franz Liszt en Belgique en 1841,” Revue belge de Musicologie 56 (2002): 241–78; Michael Saffle, Liszt in Germany, 1840–1845: A Study in Sources, Documents, and the History of Reception (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon, 1994); Luciano Chiappari, Liszt a Como e Milano (Ospedaletto: Pacini, 1997). Walker (Liszt: The Virtuoso Years) provides a succinct summary of Liszt’s concert activities in tabular form on pp. 292–95. 48 In particular, Liszt had problems convincing Maurice Schlesinger, the publisher of the Symphonie fantastique, of his abilities as composer. See Anik Devriès, “Un éditeur de musique ‘à la tête ardente,’ Maurice Schlesinger,” Fontes Artis Musicae 27 (1980): 125–36.

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the journal of musicology TABLE 1

Liszt’s public performances of his arrangement of the Symphonie fantastique Date & Location

220

Movement(s) performed Notes

28 December 1834 Paris Salle du Conservatoire

II, IV

Berlioz’s complete Symphonie fantastique preceded Liszt’s arrangements; Harold Symphony closed the concert; orchestra conducted by Narcisse Girard

18 December 1836 Paris Salle du Conservatoire

II, IV

“Concert donné par MM. Listz [sic] et Berlioz,” including Liszt’s Grande fantaisie symphonique and Berlioz’s Harold Symphony; orchestra conducted by Berlioz

25 May 1838 Vienna Saale der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde

II, IV

“Abschiedskonzert,” with Liszt’s two “Fragments de la Symphonie fantastique de Berlioz” preceding three Liszt/Schubert song arrangements

4 May 1844 Paris Théâtre-Italien

II

Berlioz’s Harold Symphony and overtures to Carnaval romain and Francsjuges performed; Liszt’s arrangement immediately followed an orchestral performance of “Le Bal”; orchestra conducted by Berlioz

12 June 1836 in Paris offers a pristine example of Berlioz’s overlooking the more excessive elements of Liszt’s showmanship while highlighting his fidelity to the text.49 As the Thalberg-Liszt debate was heating up in Paris in January and February 1837, and Liszt attempted in vain to placate the numerous factions within the Parisian beau monde, Berlioz once again defended his friend with the pen against the pianist’s more vocal naysayers. The roles would be largely reversed 20 years later in Weimar. A more enduring component of their success was their rapport on the concert stage. Particularly in the 1830s, Liszt frequently took part 49 See Katherine Kolb Reeve, “Primal Scenes: Smithson, Pleyel, and Liszt in the Eyes of Berlioz,” 19th-Century Music 18 (1995): 226–28. Reeve suggests that Berlioz was able to write a review in good conscience because his nose was buried in the music, thus allowing him to turn a blind eye to the more unpalatable elements of Liszt’s performing style.

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kregor in concerts either organized by Berlioz or containing several compositions by his older colleague. And while the cash-strapped Berlioz often enlisted Liszt to appear in his concerts, this was hardly unwelcome exploitation—Liszt made use of the publicity to bolster his own profile as composer, pianist, and, as soon followed, writer and critic. Moreover, the mixture of Liszt’s piano works and Berlioz’s orchestral creations offered Parisian audiences a concert-going experience that was second to none. Indeed, the triumphs of these joint concerts effectively fused Berlioz and Liszt into one performing entity. They were often mentioned in the same breath: “Liszt and Berlioz,” wrote Joseph d’Ortigue, “are two names that march to the same tune—one for the piano, the other for the orchestra.”50 The ever caustic Heinrich Heine genuinely considered their joint concerts to be Paris’s most impressive and worthwhile offering of the season, in no small part because “Liszt is the man who relates most closely to Berlioz and knows best how to perform his music.”51 Although d’Ortigue and Heine frequently moved in the same social circles as Liszt and Berlioz, and thus were more privy to details of their private lives, the camaraderie between the two artists was hardly lost on the typical reviewer or concertgoer. The premiere of portions of the Symphonie fantastique on 28 December 1834 in Paris offered no exception. An anonymous reviewer recalled for readers of the journal L’Artiste that The last concert was distinguished by two pieces played by Liszt. The first was a piano duo performed by Liszt with Mlle Vial. This composition, remarkable for its stylistic elegance, its tender and graceful melody, was delivered with the utmost perfection. Next came the “Ball” and the “March to the scaffold.” Liszt proved just how well he grasps all of the ideas of his friend Berlioz. Never have you witnessed an execution more admirable in its facility, sweetness, passion, and drive. He and his magic fingers took turns expressing the gentle and tender emotions of the “Ball” and the brilliant, powerful, and gloomy impressions of the “March.” It would be impossible to describe the enthusiasm that Liszt generated.52

50 Quoted in Joseph-Marc Bailbé, “Liszt et Berlioz: Une poétique du voyage,” La Revue musicale 405–407 (1987): 168. “Liszt et Berlioz, deux noms qui marchent ensemble. L’un a pour instument le piano, l’autre l’orchestre.” D’Ortigue expands upon this observation in his review of the Liszt-Berlioz concerts of 1836 in Écrits sur la Musique, 1827– 1846, ed. Sylvia L’Écuyer (Paris: Société française de Musicologie, 2003), 516. 51 Quoted in Liszt, An Artist’s Journey, ed. Suttoni, 220. Reports like Heine’s were instrumental in allowing for the print distribution of the Symphonie fantastique partition abroad. 52 The original orthography of the article has been retained. Anonymous, “Concert de Berlioz. Listz,” L’Artiste 8 (1834): 264. “Le dernier concert a été signalé par deux

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Other reviewers, including Berlioz himself, emphasized the overwhelmingly frenzied response that Liszt’s rendition of the second movement generated in the hall that day.53 Even if Liszt overplayed his role as sympathetic pianist somewhat—Berlioz reported that Liszt, “overtaken with emotion [from the applause], seemed for a moment unable to continue”—he nevertheless designed several moments within “Un bal” that would focus audience attention on him and his playing while simultaneously throwing Berlioz’s most important musical ideas into relief. And perhaps owing to the collaborative elements thus featured, Liszt would offer his public the second movement more than any other in the work’s short performance career. Unfortunately, the extant documentary evidence from contemporary periodicals offers few avenues for productive analytic inquiry of the Symphonie fantastique, save that Liszt’s performances met with wildly enthusiastic responses, especially in Paris. But what did Liszt’s arrangement sound and look like on stage, and how could the arranger promote Berlioz’s music when he was ostensibly the center of the show? Lawrence Kramer’s tersely cogent observation that “Liszt’s piano music . . . requires a Lisztian virtuoso, which is not far from requiring the reanimation of Liszt himself ” offers a tantalizing challenge to recreate his performance of the Symphonie fantastique.54 More recently, Carolyn Abbate has called for a renewed consideration of what she calls the “drastic” side of music, the performative element that “entails seeking a practice that at its most radical allows an actual live performance (and not a recording, even of a live performance) to become an object of absorption.”55 There is also the pronounced element of physicality inherent in Abbate’s theory that thrives on the notion of “desperation and peril”—and for many, this is the main attraction of a live performance. While it is obviously impossible to recreate Liszt’s performances in toto, however, we can at least examine his musical productions along morceaux exécutés par Listz. Le premier était un duo de piano que Listz a exécuté avec Mlle Vial. Cette composition, remarquable par l’élégance de style, par une mélodie tendre et gracieuse, a été rendue avec une délicieuse perfection. Puis sont venus le Bal et la Marche du supplice. Listz a prouvé combien il sait comprendre toutes les idées de son ami Berlioz. Jamais vous n’avez vu exécution plus admirable par la facilité, la suavité, la passion, l’entraînement. Listz sait rendre tour à tour, avec la même magie de doigté, les émotions de douceur, de tendresse, de rêverie du Bal, et les impressions éclatantes, fortes et sombres de la Marche. Il serait impossible de décrire l’enthousiasme excité par Listz.” 53 See Berlioz’s review in Le Rénovateur (5 January 1835; repr. in Hector Berlioz, Critique musicale, ed. H. Robert Cohen and Yves Gérard [Paris: Editions Buchet/Chastel, 1996–], 2:3–4); and two anonymous reviews in Le Pianiste 2/5 (5 January 1835): 42, and the Gazette musicale de Paris 2/2 (11 January 1835): 15. 54 Lawrence Kramer, “Franz Liszt and the Virtuoso Public Sphere: Sight and Sound in the Rise of Mass Entertainment,” in Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2002), 92. 55 Carolyn Abbate, “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?” Critical Inquiry 30 (Spring 2004): 506.

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kregor the similar lines of performance risk and audience spectacle. The second movement of the Symphonie fantastique arrangement offers some of the clearest examples of Liszt’s walking the line between transcription and composition, as he creates Lisztian moments unique from their source. The above-cited concert reviews convey a sense of the electricity that Liszt brought to the stage, but they are insufficient in documenting how his unique performance practice came into being during the first half of the early 1830s. One of the most important sources relating to his performance aesthetic to come from this period is a diary of instructions maintained by Auguste Boissier that Liszt imparted to his young student and Auguste’s daughter Valérie in 1832. Auguste frequently captured Liszt in the throes of a pianistic revelation: On 20 March 1832 “he was entranced by Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture which had been performed on Sunday in the Conservatoire. . . . For us he played some fragments of this overture in a striking manner—an impetuous, jerky chord followed by a kind of hopelessness, almost a kind of musical insanity. Then comes a phrase of angelic song that seemed to fall from the heavens.”56 Two months earlier she had witnessed Liszt work through themes from Rossini’s Guillaume Tell Overture in a similarly chaotic fashion.57 All the expected hyperbole notwithstanding, the writer does illuminate Liszt’s fascination with exploiting contrasts— in particular, staggering more visually stunning passages with thematically static moments. In Liszt’s rendition Boissier sees the first section of Beethoven’s overture and hears the second. The juxtaposition is not only thematic, but highly visual—consider how Boissier, in providing musical memory aides in her diary, was unable to characterize Liszt’s fragmented first theme physically but could easily find an image for the second. And like his spontaneous arrangements of Beethoven’s or Rossini’s overtures, the second movement of the Symphonie fantastique arrangement telescopes the aural and visual into an experience worthy of a Liszt-Berlioz concert.58 56 Auguste Boissier, Liszt Pédagogue: Leçons de piano données pas Liszt à Mademoiselle Valérie Boissier à Paris en 1832 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1927), 86. “Il avait été ravi de l’ouverture de Coriolan de Beethoven qu’on avait jouée dimanche au Conservatoire et qu’il regarde comme une des œuvres les plus grandes, les plus complètes, les plus admirables qui soient sorties du cerveau gigantesque de Beethoven. Il nous a joué quelques lambeaux de cette ouverture d’une manière saisissante; c’est un accord brusque, quelque chose de heurté, suivi d’une sorte de désespoir, de démence musicale. Puis c’est une phrase de chant angélique qui semble tomber du ciel.” 57 Boissier, Liszt Pédagogue, 25–26. 58 Liszt’s arrangement of Beethoven’s Coriolan overture has not survived, but he listed it alongside arrangements of the Egmont and Zauberflöte overtures in his Programme général des morceaux exécutés par F. Liszt à ses concerts de 1838 à 1848, which Mueller has rigorously examined in her “Liszt’s Catalogues and Inventories of His Music,” Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 34 (1992): 231–50.

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The first half of the 1830s were experimental times for Liszt notationally, and he extended the range of acceptable expressive marks with the goal of committing as much of his performance style to paper as possible. In pieces like the first Apparition from 1834, he developed a series of lines and boxes to designate grades of ritardandos and accelerandos, respectively. And sections of the one-movement Harmonies poétiques et religieuses from the same year abandon time signatures entirely; Liszt instead writes beat divisions directly under each note in an effort to indicate its duration precisely. These and other notational aids allowed Liszt to document his creations while losing only a modicum of nuance during the transferal process. It is not difficult to imagine how these performance markings could help better preserve Liszt’s performances of Beethoven or Rossini for the Boissier family. It is also hardly coincidental that Liszt’s efforts in notating music accurately overlap in many ways with his stated goals of reproducing Berlioz’s first symphony for the piano. Liszt often augmented these expressive marks with equally exact prose instructions to the performer, which sought to capture the nuances of what Boissier, Berlioz, and even Hallé could only approximate. In Example 3, the pianist is told to make the idée fixe “molto pronunziato” and later “cantando sempre.” The accompaniment is to be played “lamentoso,” “dolce sospirando,” and finally “perdendendo” [sic]. Throughout the entire passage, we are told to “gardez toujours la pedale douce.” (Berlioz’s score transmits a lone “espressivo” direction to the flute and oboe soloists during this passage.) The abundance of markings in this passage offers the performer little latitude for independent interpretation. At least one reviewer thought Liszt’s marginal notes to be excessive. Their ubiquity in the partition, the anonymous critic complained, raised the level of passion and violence so high that the listener was robbed of the emotional ups and downs that make a composition compelling: The little Italian words . . . are in this piece of such a strange type that everyone will think them mechanical. Instead of the usual “Andante, Adagio, Allegro,” one reads “Feroce.” Anytime a word is given in Italian, it always has something to do with ferocity. What a beginning! But that is not all! On the third page one reads “il più forte possibile,” then two systems later “marcatissimo”; a bit further down “sempre F.F.F.” May these three fs be observed! Finally, instead of “con amore,” one finds “sempre forte ed energico.” And instead of “con espressione,” one astoundingly reads “con furore.” With the aid of such detailed performance instructions, the workout needed just to practice this piece could serve as a healthy substitute for horse-riding in winter.59 59 Allgemeiner musikalischer Anzeiger 9/12 (1837): 46. “Berlioz hat seinen schönen von Liszt für das Clavier eingerichteten ‘Marsch nach der Richtstatt’ (marche du supplice)

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kregor Liszt had indeed intended his reading of the Symphonie fantastique to astound, but its novel approach to blending reproduced music and recreated performance also helped guide the listener or reader through the musical text itself. Critics who saw Liszt as just another robotic virtuoso—immune to emotion or imagination—might have sympathized with the overwhelmed Austrian reviewer and easily dismissed this component of Liszt’s transcription.60 But if the performance marks looked foreign on the page, in the hands of an able performer they could come alive. The material that Liszt adds to his partition serves to mediate between performer and composer. Indeed, the physical gestures required to perform, say, the second movement combine with Berlioz’s compositional elements in a way that creates several gripping on-stage moments. These gestures come at surprising junctures and often serve to prepare the listener for Berlioz’s themes. Consider Example 6 from the second movement. These measures link the first statement of the idée fixe (recall Ex. 3) and the third appearance of the waltz theme in the lower strings. The rhythms, textures, and register remain static, and there is little in terms of melody or unexpected harmony. But while this passage may offer the listener little in the way of gripping musical material, it constitutes one of the most visually exciting moments of the entire movement: With the register high, the texture plain, and the pianist playing pianissimo without the pedals to smooth over moments of spotty execution, wrong notes stand out—the audience will notice, for instance, if the pianist misses the high B  in measure 163. In his piano

herausgegeben. Die kleinen italienischen Wörter, welche in den musikalischen Werken gemeiniglich den Tact und den Ausdruck bezeichnen, sind in diesem Stücke von so besonderer Art, daß sie Jedermann unwillkührlich auffallen. So liest man darin anstatt der üblichen Worte: ‘Andante, Adagio, Allegro,’ den Ausdruck: ‘feroce.’ Wenn das Wort auch italienisch gegeben ist, so deutet es doch immer auf Ferocität hin. Ein lieblicher Anfang! Dieß ist aber nicht Alles! Auf der dritten Seite liest man ‘il più forte possibile’ dann zwey Zeilen tiefer ‘marcatissimo’, etwas weiter ‘sempre F.F.F.’ drey f, man merke dieses Zeichen; endlich anstatt ‘con amore,’ findet man ‘sempre forte ed energico’ und anstatt ‘con espressione’ liesst man bestürzt ‘con furore’. Nach diesen so bestimmten Bezeichnungen könnte selbst im Winter die Einstudierung jenes Stücks eine gesunde die Bewegung zu Pferde mit Vortheil ersetzende Übung abgeben.” 60 It was in the 1830s that criticism of the virtuoso started to become widespread. By the 1840s, particularly in Germany, a fair number of tracts leveled against the histrionic performer had appeared. An overview of this phenomenon can be found in Dana Gooley, “The Battle Against Instrumental Virtuosity in the Early Nineteenth Century,” in Franz Liszt and His World, ed. Dana Gooley and Christopher H. Gibbs (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2006), 75–111. Gabriele Brandstetter has recently offered a nuanced view of the 19th-century virtuoso as essentially a figure of the theater; that is, a performer driven by a rhetoric that blends the mechanic and poetic in a way that constantly teeters on the edge of inauthenticity. See her “Die Szene des Virtuosen: Zu einem Topos von Theatralität,” Hofmannsthal-Jahrbuch 10 (2002): 213–43.

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the journal of musicology example 6. Symphonie fantastique, “Un bal,” mm. 163–70, Liszt arrangement

² ² ¦− ŁŁ Š ² 4/ 

163

!

²² Š ² 4/ ¦−ŁŁl \\ ² ² Ło Š ² 

167

!

− Łl − Łl lŁ l Łl ¾ −Łl − Ł ¾ −Łl  \\ scherzando con grazia ¾ ¦−ŁŁ ŁŁ ¾ ¹ ŁŁ ŁŁ ¾ ¹ l l l l

l ¾ ¦ Łl ¦ Ł

¦ Łl

Ło 

¾ Łl

Łl

smorzando

²² Š ² ¾ ¦ ŁŁ ŁŁ ¾ ¹ Łl Łl

Łl

Ło 

Łl 

¾ Łl

Łl

Łl

Łl 

diminuendo

¾ Ł Ł ¾ ¹ ¦ ŁŁl ŁŁl

l ¾ ² Łl ² Ł

² Łl

sempre

¾ ²Ł ŁŁ l

ŁŁ ¾ ¹ Łl

² Łl Łl ¦ Łl Łl l l l l ¾ ²Ł Ł Ł ¦ Ł Ł ¾ Ł Ł Ł straccinato

¾ ² ŁŁ ŁŁ ¾ ¹ ² ŁŁl ŁŁl

¾ ¦ ŁŁ ŁŁ ¾ ¹ ¦ ² ŁlŁ ŁlŁ

¾ Ł Ł ¾ ¹ ¦ ŁŁl ŁŁl

226 music Liszt normally facilitates the navigation of octaves through several registers with four 16th notes to be played by an alternation of the thumb and little finger (ascending: 1-5-1-5; descending: 5-1-5-1), as he does in the fugato section of the fifth movement (see Ex. 7).61 Such technical alleviations are not to be found in the second movement, however, and Liszt’s detailed notation leaves little room to finesse the passage. The pianist should not take the fourth 16th note of each measure with the left hand—to do so would destroy the spectacle of the moment, diminishing the careful plan that Liszt has crafted for the movement as a whole. Strictly speaking, the music contained in these passages belongs to Berlioz, and the Lisztian moments hardly infringe on Berlioz’s most attention-grabbing compositional solutions. Indeed, it is noteworthy that the examples cited above function as transitional passages within the movement’s formal plan. The most technically straightforward moments in “Un bal” occur during the appearances of the waltz melody and the idée fixe. In short, Liszt has not randomly chosen his moments to show off; rather, he has selected musical targets that neither over61 See also the fourth movement, m. 130, of Schlesinger’s 1834 edition. When Liszt revised this movement in the 1860s, he added several more of these figures. See the Rieter-Biedermann edition of “Marche au Supplice de la Sinfonie fantastique (Episode de la Vie d’un Artiste),” m. 122ff. The Stichvorlage of this edition is located in US-Wc in a folder of assorted Liszt-Berlioz arrangements.

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kregor example 7. Symphonie fantastique, “Songe d’un nuit du sabbat,” mm. 293–96, Liszt arrangement 293

!

Š 42 Ý2 4

Łp ² Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ŁŁ ² ŁŁ Ł Ł Ł Ł Ło Ł Ł Ł Ł 

o ŁŁ ŁŁ Ł ŁŁ Ł Ł ² Ł Ł ŁŁ Ł Ł ²Ł o Ł
² Ł Ł Ł ŁŁ Łu ² Łu Łu Ł u

o o ŁŁŁ ŁŁŁ Ł Ł Ło ² Ł Ł Ł

8 o o ŁŁ o Ł 295 Ł Ł Ł Ł ² Ł ŁŁŁ ŁŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ ŁŁ Ł Ł ŁŁ ŁŁ Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Š  Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ło Ło ² Ło ² Ło Ło Ło Ło Ło ÝŁ Ł Ł Ł ²Ł ²Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł   ^[ ^[ va

!

227 shadow the ingenuity of Berlioz’s thematic content nor threaten the integrity of his overall conception of the movement. Thus a successful live performance will expose a persistent tug-of-war between composer and performer by capitalizing on the visual dissonance between thematically important moments and transitional ones. In fact, this tension between Berlioz’s music and Liszt’s spectacle is resolved only in the coda (see Ex. 8), where the merger is heard and seen in a very demonstrative way: Berlioz’s apoplectic waltz rattles around in the middle register while Liszt’s left hand, springing from one octave to another and encasing the main melody, acts as ersatz conductor for the audience. The collaboration between Berlioz and Liszt that took place behind closed doors during the genesis of the Symphonie fantastique arrangement suddenly takes on a life of its own on the concert stage. Liszt’s detailed—at times almost obsessive—engagement with transitions is not surprising, for he would infuse these formal areas with spectacle time and again in his opera fantasies. Indeed, some of the most original and gestural moments in, say, the Réminiscences de Don Juan, ostensibly take place in the most formally unassuming sections.62 Moreover, many works by Liszt—both original and arranged—that exist in 62 A detailed, programmatic analysis of this work can be found in Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1995), 528–40.

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the journal of musicology example 8. Symphonie fantastique, “Un bal,” mm. 346–50, Liszt arrangement

!

228

 o 346 Ł molto energico Ł Ł Ł ² Ł Ł ² Ł ¦ ŁŁŁ Ł ²²² / Š 4 ŁŁŁ Ł Ł Ł ŁŁ Ł ŁŁŁ ² Ł Ł ² Ł Ł Ł ŁŁŁŁ ^[ cono fuoco ^[o ŁŁo ² Ý ²² / o ¾ ŁŁ ¾ ¾ ŁŁ ¾ ¾ ¾ ŁŁ 4 ŁŁŁ Ł  ~  ~

ŁŁŁ Ł ŁŁŁ Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ŁŁŁ Ł ^[ Ł ŁŁ ¾ Łu ¾ ŁŁu ~

ŁŁ ŁŁ × Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ŁŁ × Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł

ŁŁ ² Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ŁŁ ² Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł

8va ŁŁo ŁŁo ŁŁ o o Ł ¾ ŁŁ ¾ ¾ ¾ ŁŁŁ ¾ ¾ Š  ¾ Ł Ł

 ~

 ~



multiple versions often betray more extensive reconsiderations of transitional passages than other sections. For instance, one of the few differences between Liszt’s 1867 solo piano arrangement of Richard Wagner’s Isolden’s Liebes-Tod and its second edition eight years later is shown in Example 9. The first version of this measure prepares a grandiose rendition of the main theme by outlining the dominant seventh chord in the left hand while mimicking high string tremolos in the right hand (Ex. 9a). The revision of 1875 gives greater weight to the dominant by featuring a demonstrative, written-out octave turn above a sweeping left-hand octave arpeggio (Ex. 9b). Liszt’s second solution gives the transition a trajectory that calls attention to a formidable pianistic technique while making the arrival of Wagner’s main theme even more momentous. Distinctions between composer and performer are nowhere better maintained than in the second movement of the Symphonie fantastique arrangement. “Un bal” would have offered audiences Berlioz’s compositional profile without denying them Liszt’s charismatic stage presence. Performance of the first, third, and fifth movements yields fewer visual moments like those encountered in the second; even the fourth movement, despite the sheer amount of volume required for a convincing performance, keeps the pianist regularly tethered to the keyboard. If Liszt was looking to bring his audiences the best of both worlds, the second movement was the most sensible one. Performances of the work, although rare during the 1830s and 40s, succeeded in showcasing an idealized balance between the two artists. Liszt acted as a sort of onstage tour guide to Berlioz’s first symphony, his calculated gestures at the piano illustrating the musical highpoints along the way. It is difficult to sustain a similar collaborative argument with other Liszt creations that were inspired by Berlioz’s compositions. The tran-

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kregor example 9a. Isolden’s Liebes-Tod, first version (1867), m. 47, Liszt arrangement

Łn ŁŁp Ł ŁŁ Ł ŁŁ Ł ŁŁ Ł ŁŁl × ŁŁn ¦ Ł ײ ŁŁŁ ² Ł ² × Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł × ŁŁ  ² ŁŁ × ŁŁ ² ŁŁŁ ŁŁ Ł Ł  ²Ł Ł rinforzando Ý ²²²²  Łl ² Łl Ł ¦Ł Łl Ł Ł Ł ¦Ł Ł   

Ł ŁŁŁ

²² Š ² ²² 

47

!

Łl Ł 

example 9b. Isolden’s Liebes-Tod, second version (1875), m. 47, Liszt arrangement

n ²²²² ײ ŁŁŁ ŁŁŁ ¦ ŁŁŁ ŁŁŁ ŁŁŁ ŁŁŁ ŁŁŁ ŁŁŁ ŁŁŁ ŁŁŁ ŁŁŁ ²× ŁŁŁl ² Ł × Ł Ł Ł ² Ł Ł   ² Ł × Ł ² ŁŁ ŁŁ Ł Ł Š ף  ² ŁŁ ŁŁ Ł rinforzando Ł Ł Ł ² ŁŁl Ł Ý ²²²²  Ł Ł Ł Ł ²Ł ² Ł ¦Ł Ł Ł ŁŁ Ł Ł Ł Ł ¦Ł Ł Ł Ł

47

!

3

~

~

3

3

3

3

ŁŁl ŁŁ ŁŁl Ł

3

scriptions of the Ouverture des francs-juges and Ouverture du roi Lear, redolent as they are of a concerted effort by the two artists to promote one another, remained unplayed publicly. To be sure, Liszt did exhibit his massive Grande fantaisie symphonique to the Parisian public on more than one occasion during the 1830s. This single-movement composition for piano and orchestra, begun as Liszt was wrapping up work on the Symphonie fantastique arrangement, is based on two of the more successful movements from Berlioz’s Le retour à la vie (revived in amended form at Weimar in 1855 under the title Lélio), the sequel to the Symphonie fantastique.63 The scoring of soloist versus orchestra recalls the opposition posed by Hallé in his recollection: Even before a note sounds the audience is already predisposed to hear Liszt over Berlioz. And that is exactly what happened. Reviewers frequently commented on the work’s 63 On the short-lived history of the Grande fantaisie symphonique, see Rosenblatt, “The Concerto as Crucible,” 248–89.

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success as an independent composition. One critic for the Gazette musicale noted that “above all it is the manner in which he treats the melody . . . that Mr. Liszt should be recognized as one of the most skillful harmonists of our day.”64 Assessments such as these must have encouraged the pianist to hone his compositional profile, perhaps at the expense of his image as a virtuoso; and the feeling was expressed, even among Liszt’s supporters, that his older works no longer did full justice to his new artistic persona.65 Indeed, with the exception of the Beethoven symphony arrangements, the next major works to flow from Liszt’s pen were entirely original: a slew of opera fantasies in 1835/36 followed by the Vingtquatre grandes études and Album d’un voyageur in 1837. Later that year he began to seek out publishers for these works. Even his infamous critique of Thalberg’s works from January 1837—the review that caused such a stir among Paris’s beau monde—suggests the level at which Liszt considered himself a composer. Indeed, by the time he arrived in Vienna on 10 April 1838, his journeyman days were well behind him. Although Liszt had arrived in the city under the philanthropic banner of raising money for the Hungarians inundated by the March flooding of the Danube, he had really come to build a name for himself on the foundation of his inimitable piano technique and burgeoning compositional portfolio. He had, in short, come to conquer: “My arrival has been announced in all the journals,” he wrote to d’Agoult, “and unless I am truly deceiving myself . . . I will make an immense effect.”66 The eight concerts he presented included the only time that the pianist would perform the Symphonie fantastique outside of Paris. How did Liszt’s Viennese performance of the Symphonie fantastique compare with the Parisian Liszt-Berlioz concert, where the pair could tailor it according to their intimate knowledge of the audience? It is precisely Liszt’s invariable interest in his on-stage reception that ac64 Anonymous, “Concerts de la semaine,” Gazette musicale de Paris 2 (12 April 1835): 130. “C’est à la manière dont il a traité la mélodie du pêcheur surtout, que M. Listz s’est fait reconnâitre pour un des plus habiles harmonistes de l’époque.” 65 D’Ortigue wrote in a 24 July 1836 article for La Quotidienne that “Les anciennes compositions de M. Liszt, bien inférieures à celles qu’il nous a fait entendre dans cette dernière séance, révélaient néanmoins, autant que le caractère de son exécution, autant que les sympathies bien connues de son âme, une propension vers le mysticisme, vers l’inspiration biblique, vers les idées contemplatives et religieuses.” See d’Ortigue, Écrits sur la Musique, 505. 66 Liszt/d’Agoult, 12 April 1838, p. 311. “Mon arrivée est annoncée dans tous les journaux et si je ne me fais des illusions grosses comme les poings de Mallefille, je produirai un immense effet.” A comprehensive overview of Liszt’s activities in Vienna in the spring of 1838 can be found in Christopher H. Gibbs, “ ‘Just Two Words. Enormous Success’: Liszt’s 1838 Vienna Concerts,” in Franz Liszt and His World, ed. Dana Gooley and Christopher H. Gibbs (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2006), 167–230.

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kregor counts for the near silence the work received outside of Paris. In 1838, the Symphonie fantastique, which never had been performed outside Paris either in symphonic or arranged form, took a back seat to Liszt’s most lucrative creations: piano solo arrangements of Schubert’s lieder. Liszt premiered his arrangements of Schubert’s “Ständchen” and “Lob der Thränen” on 23 April 1838, and at every subsequent public concert in Vienna that season he either accompanied singers or performed his arrangements of Schubert’s lieder on the piano. Liszt had found the Viennese analogue to Berlioz in Schubert, and he used this circumstance to full advantage. Not even Beethoven was represented on stage as frequently as Schubert. At the 25 May Abschiedskonzert, the second and fourth movements of the Symphonie fantastique shared the bill with Rossini’s Guillaume Tell overture, two songs by the local Viennese composer Johann Vesque von Püttlingen, for which Liszt provided the accompaniment, Liszt’s Rondeau fantastique, and—as closer—three Schubert arrangements: “Sey mir gegrüsst,” “Erlkönig,” and “Die Post.” His Grande Valse di bravura served as the encore.67 Heinrich Adami, critic for the Allgemeine Theaterzeitung, glossed over Berlioz’s work, focusing instead—as he had in his previous reviews—on the enthusiasm generated by Liszt’s performance of “Erlkönig” and the Grande Valse.68 And Eduard Hanslick, although not in attendance that day, recalled years later that “at his farewell concert Liszt played fragments from Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, a laudable homage to his brilliant friend, who at the time was still entirely unknown in Vienna. The work, however, failed to resonate with the audience.”69 Although Liszt would later thank the Viennese publicly for being the most accommodating audience he had ever met, his tribute may be read as a veiled admission that their reception of the Symphonie fantastique betrayed the ultimate mismatch between that audience’s tastes and those of the French capital. 67 According to the records of the publisher Tobias Haslinger—Liszt’s concert organizer in Vienna—920 tickets were sold for the Abschiedskonzert, with a total intake of 2127.20 fl. Further financial details of this concert can be found in Haslinger’s “Geschäftliche Papiere-Abrechnung und Belege über das 7. Konzert (1838),” located in D-WRgs, GSA 59/133,8. The playbill is reproduced in Gibbs, “Liszt’s 1838 Vienna Concerts,” 210. 68 Heinrich Adami, “Letztes Concert des Herrn Franz Lißt,” Allgemeine TheaterZeitung (28 May 1838): 470. Quoted in Dezso˝ Legány, Franz Liszt: Unbekannte Presse und Briefe aus Wien 1822–1886 (Vienna: Böhlau, 1984), 49. “Ich sage nur, daß sich das Publikum schon von der ersten Nummer an in Aufregung befand, und daß sich bei dem Vortrage des ‘Erlkönig’ und des Bravourwalzers der Enthusiasmus bis zu einem Grade steigerte, wie ich es noch nie in einem Concerte erlebte.” 69 Eduard Hanslick, Geschichte des Concertwesens in Wien (Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1869–70), 1:336. “In seinem Abschieds-Concerte spielte Lißt Fragmente aus Berlioz’ ‘Sinfonie fantastique’, eine lobenswerthe Huldigung für seinen damals in Wien noch gänzlich ungekannten genialen Freund, die aber hier keinen Anklang fand.”

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Liszt was fighting an uphill battle by attempting to compete with Schubert on his home turf, and Hanslick’s eulogy for the Symphonie fantastique further demonstrates that almost everything about the work went against the artistic predilections of the Viennese. Most importantly, the programmatic elements were seen as too French. The ostensibly exotic nature of compositions with extramusical, literary descriptions or programs often came under fire from conservative Viennese critics who declared the superiority of symphonic music and other absolute forms;70 they also elicited suspicion from the national censors.71 (It is noteworthy that the edition of the Symphonie fantastique arrangement published in Vienna around this time lacked Berlioz’s program entirely.) Nor was the problem of alleged gallicism limited to Vienna— in 1835 Schumann had written of the program that “all of Germany gladly returns it to Berlioz: Such signposts always smack of something unworthy and pretentious!”72 Liszt’s Schubert arrangements neither forced a program nor offered a limited interpretation of the original songs; rather, auditors could recreate the text of the original while experiencing Liszt’s pyrotechnics on stage, and these elements could remain separate. In short, the dozens of Schubert arrangements that Liszt completed toward the close of the 1830s came to supplant the Symphonie fantastique as embodying the ideal balance between composer and arranger, particularly in Germany. By the second half of the 1830s, Liszt had begun to model himself consciously after German composers, eschewing the French aesthetic heritage that had served him since well before the beginning of the decade. “My place will be between Weber and Beethoven,” he admitted, “or rather between Hummel and Onslow.” His triumphs in Vienna only increased his ambition. He continued with the concession that

70 According to Gooley, “In Vienna Liszt flaunted his connection with the French romantics by playing pieces that had a literary basis [like the Symphonie fantastique], . . . as though he were cultivating his exotic appeal” (The Virtuoso Liszt, 124). Liszt would quickly reverse his position, revealing in his open letter to the Viennese (reproduced in Legány, Unbekannte Presse und Briefe, 56–58) soon after his departure that he had never before felt as understood artistically as he had in Vienna. His public pronouncement is corroborated by his private letter to Adolphe Nourrit of 9 July 1838. See L. Quicherat, Adolphe Nourrit: Sa vie, son talent, son caractère, sa correspondance [Paris: Hachette, 1867], 3:377. 71 In fact, suspicions of Liszt’s sympathies toward the 1830 French revolutionaries ultimately cost him the coveted title of Royal and Imperial Chamber Virtuoso, an honor already afforded Thalberg and, more recently, Clara Wieck. See August Fournier’s detailed newspaper article of the whole affair, “Liszt und Sedlnitzky,” in D-WRgs, GSA 59/280, 2. 72 “Phantastische Symphonie,” NZfM 3/13 (14 August 1835): 50. “Ganz Deutschland schenkt es ihm: solche Wegweiser behalten immer etwas unwürdiges und Charlatanmäßiges.” In fact, part of Schumann’s rhetorical tactic in his review is to discredit Berlioz’s program in order to highlight the work’s intrinsic, absolute musical merits.

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kregor I am perhaps a génie manqué—only time will tell. I just know that I am not a mediocre man. My “mission” will be to incorporate poetry into piano music in a brilliant manner. I attach the utmost importance to my harmonies [harmonies]. That will be my serious work, and I will sacrifice everything for it. When I have finished my tour as pianist, I will play only for my own public. I will mold and elevate it.73

The musical hendiadys that lies at the heart of the Symphonie fantastique transcription had little place in Liszt’s bold new way of conceptualizing himself as an artist. His duel with Thalberg had occasioned the formation of two highly partisan groups within the Parisian social elite, and in the fallout Liszt would spend the majority of his subsequent concert years away from the French capital as he sought to realize a longstanding goal of fusing poetry and virtuosity—an effort that strained his relationship with Berlioz while strengthening his connection to German and Hungarian artists.74 He would become more entangled in the national affairs of these two countries—the Hungarian “saber of honor” episode being the most infamous—as the concert years went on, and his already fragile reputation in France would suffer accordingly well beyond the 1840s. The Symphonie fantastique had in large part defined Liszt’s Parisian experience—he had witnessed the work’s premiere in 1830 and used it to showcase important milestones within his own artistic career, particularly his entry as a virtuoso pianist into the public sphere in 1834 and his reemergence as a complete artist in late 1836. But without Berlioz and his orchestral music to balance with Liszt’s own works, the Symphonie fantastique became irrelevant in his experiences abroad. In Vienna Liszt realized that he could recreate—even eclipse—the fervor that the Liszt-Berlioz concerts had generated in Paris if he altered his programs to feature the music of German composers more prominently.75 The Lisztian spaces that characterized moments of “Un bal” 73 D’Agoult/Stern, Mémoires, souvenirs et journaux, 2:201. “Ma place sera entre Weber et Beethoven ou bien entre Hummel et Onslow. Je suis peut-être un génie manqué, c’est ce que le temps fera voir. Je sens que je ne suis point un homme médiocre. Ma ‘mission’ à moi sera d’avoir le premier mis avec quelque éclat la poésie dans la musique de piano. Ce à quoi j’attache le plus d’importance, ce sont mes harmonies; ce sera là mon œuvre sérieuse; je ne sacrifierai rien à l’effet. Quand j’aurai terminé mon tour de pianiste, je ne jouerai plus que pour mon public à moi; je le formerai, je l’élèverai.” 74 The complicated structure of the Parisian listening audience during the 1830s is explored in Gooley, The Virtuoso Liszt, chap. 1. Thalberg managed to ally most of Paris’s upper echelon to his side; Liszt garnered less defined aristocratic support, although he was successful in attracting much of Paris’s artistic sector. The whole affair severely crippled Liszt’s reputation in the French capital, for successive virtuosos to arrive in Paris were measured by Thalberg’s standards, not those of Liszt. 75 Michael Saffle has juxtaposed the prominence that Liszt gave to, say, the Réminiscences de Don Juan in Germany against the work’s near absence on the French concert

233

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the journal of musicology became the dominant elements of Liszt’s new compositions, whereby the overpowering impact of the artist’s persona was too sharply focused to be shared with another. Indeed, Liszt’s only performance of fragments from the Symphonie fantastique abroad thus took on new symbolic significance: It functioned both as a fond acknowledgment of his relationship with Berlioz and an abandonment of his former collaborative way of life.

Liszt’s Symphonie fantastique Five years into his tenure at Weimar, Liszt recalled one unfortunate byproduct of his wildly successful years as a traveling virtuoso. Amidst preparation for a performance of a revised version of Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini the pianist lamented:

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there are a very small number of men and works that cannot be understood and admired by halves. Berlioz is of that number; and I like to believe that he will not misjudge the motives which up till now have put me off actively involving myself in the performance of his works in Germany. . . . I consider myself honor bound to create for his works, one by one, the positions they deserve. It is, for me, a matter of art and of personal conviction; in consequence it has to be dealt with seriously, worthily, without the least trifling.76

The late 1830s and 1840s may have indeed proved to be one of his more fallow periods in championing Berlioz’s compositions. But unbeknownst to Liszt, his persistent presence on stage nevertheless accomplished much in disseminating the name and work of his old friend. Indeed, the seeds of Berlioz’s warm welcome to Weimar and northern Germany in general in the late 1840s and 1850s were in part sown by the numerous editions of the Symphonie fantastique arrangement that were issued in the wake of Liszt’s spectacular concert appearances. As Berlioz and his music became more of a fixture of the German landscape and the full score of the Symphonie fantastique was made more widely available, interest in the piano partition waned. Liszt made a handful of slight revisions to the fourth movement in the mid 1860s, which he coupled with an untitled fantasy on the idée fixe to form the “Marche au Supplice de la Sinfonie fantastique” in 1866. By this time stage during Liszt’s virtuoso concert years. See Saffle, Liszt in Germany. Liszt was rewarded for these choices, being named an honorary member of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde just two days before his final Viennese concert. 76 Letter to Gaetano Belloni (14 January 1852), quoted in David Cairns, Berlioz: Servitude and Greatness, vol. 2 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2000), 469; emphasis added.

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kregor the rift between Berlioz and Liszt had become irreconcilable, and it was more than a decade later when the last significant change in content to the piano arrangement of the Symphonie fantastique occurred. In 1877 Liszt issued a second edition of the complete arrangement with Constantin Sander of Leipzig. The texts of the 1834 Schlesinger print and the 1877 edition are essentially the same, but a new footnote in the first movement stands out for its historical and ontological implications. It refers to measure 359 and reads “This third line can not be played simultaneously with the other two on the piano—it only serves to illustrate the context of the original score.”77 Liszt’s ascetic second edition eliminated many of the effusive performance instructions that helped highlight the delicate balancing act between himself and Berlioz on stage. The spectacular Liszt-Berlioz concerts had become archaic, and Liszt’s changes effectively removed the work from the concert hall, the very venue for which it had been created.78 For Liszt in the 1870s and beyond, the content of the Symphonie fantastique was no longer to be performed but rather to be revered and remembered as celebrating one of the most important musical partnerships of the first half of the 19th century. Harvard University

ABSTRACT Franz Liszt’s transcription of Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique has long been recognized for its innovative approach to musical reproduction—that is, its remarkable ability to recreate the sonic nuances of its model. However, the 1830s were a period of intense artistic and professional collaboration with Berlioz, and the genesis of the Symphonie fantastique transcription can thus also be interpreted as emblematic of this developing relationship. In particular, a gestural analysis of

77 See p. 15 of the second edition: “NB. Cette troisième ligne n’est pas executable, en meme [sic] temps que les deux autres, sur le piano, et sert seulement comme indication du contexte de la partition originale.” Liszt’s letter to Sander dated 11 November 1876 reveals the care with which he oversaw the publication of the second edition: “Mit der heutigen Post empfangen Sie meine letzte Revision von Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. Dem Titel habe ich zwei bemerkungen beigefügt, die ich Sie bitte bemerken und befolgen zu wollen. Also ‘Partition de Piano’ — nicht Arrangement. . . . dann, ist es unumgänglich nothwendig ihrer 2ten Ausgabe, das ganze Program von Berlioz, franzözisch und deutsch (auf der 1ten Seite nach dem Titelblatt) einzurücken.” See Michael Short, ed. and trans., Liszt Letters in the Library of Congress (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon, 2003), 345– 46. 78 Jim Samson has recognized Liszt’s move away from virtuosity—and by extension performance—toward a fixed, independent work beginning with the Weimar period. See Samson, Virtuosity and the Music Work: “The Transcendental Studies” of Liszt (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003).

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the journal of musicology

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the work’s content, as it can be recreated in part through Liszt’s meticulous performance notation, indicates that the transcription served to reinforce a public perception of Berlioz as composer and Liszt as performer, whereby Liszt guides his audiences through Berlioz’s enigmatic compositions by means of kinesic visual cues. Investigation of heretofore unknown manuscript materials suggests that this dynamic was further emphasized in Liszt’s other renderings of Berlioz’s orchestral works from the period. For various reasons, the transcription’s inherently collaborative nature failed to impress audiences outside of Paris. As Liszt embarked in earnest upon a solo career toward the end of the decade and his concert appearances with Berlioz became less frequent, interest in the work waned on the part of both arranger and audience. Moreover, it was in the late 1830s that Liszt began adding several new works to his public repertory, especially opera fantasies, Schubert song arrangements, and weighty compositions by German composers. This decision effectively removed his earlier material—including the all-too-French Symphonie fantastique—from on-stage circulation. Indeed, when Liszt revised the transcription in the 1870s, he eliminated many of extraordinary collaborative elements found in the 1834 version, thereby disassociating it from the arena for which it was created. Keywords: Franz Liszt Hector Berlioz Symphonie fantastique Piano transcription Reception history