Chapter 23 - Transcription

Summary

Few compositions escaped the transcriber’s pen in the nineteenth century. New and old symphonies, operas, quartets, art and popular songs and myriad combinations of chamber and vocal ensembles were repackaged to meet the needs of a public eager for music that could be played, studied or discussed in the domestic sphere. While indefatigable transcribers such as Friedrich Mockwitz and Otto Singer Jr – to say nothing of those who went uncredited and thus remain unknown – provided much of this material, the practice in fact spread far beyond the staff of the major publishing houses of the day. Ludwig van Beethoven arranged or oversaw arrangements of his large-ensemble and chamber works, as did Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms decades later. Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Ignaz Moscheles, Felix Mendelssohn and even the cash-strapped Richard Wagner adapted numerous foreign symphonies, overtures and operas. And Georges Bizet, for reasons that remain unclear, rendered an enormous number of works by Charles Gounod, Jules Massenet, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ambroise Thomas and others for two- and four-hand piano.