ABSTRACT
Throughout his life Liszt re-created an enormous body of musical material, including much of his own work. As early as 1828, shortly after his father’s death, he arranged two Hungarian recruiting songs for solo piano. He even rewrote one of them a few years later, and he added adaptations to his Années de pèlerinage volumes, his Album d’un voyageur, and several of his other “original” musical anthologies. During the 1830s he began transforming keyboard scores, symphonic works, and songs by other composers. Although he sometimes transcribed more or less literally, Liszt more often re-composed as his whimsy took him. By the end of his life he had become perhaps the nineteenth-century’s most successful and prolific musical adapter. The present chapter identifies a number of his transcriptions, primarily in terms of characteristics they share with other portions of his enormous output. It also summarizes previous approaches to the fidelity, appropriateness, and purposes of musical adaptations, and it raises issues associated with collaborations with other composers, transcribers, and arrangers; and the role finances have played in his reputation and that of nineteenth-century European composers in general.
