2 - Arranged for Solo Piano: Carl Tausig and His Progeny

Summary

First Step: Carl Tausig's Arrangement

In the four decades following Schubert's death, although composer-pianists created solo piano transcriptions of some of his keyboard march duets, there was no such interest in the three Marches militaires. Even so ardent a devotee of Schubert's music as Liszt conspicuously bypassed the D. 733 set when he wrote four marches for solo piano in the 1840s, instead drawing the material from D. 818, 819, 859, and 886. Although Brahms was a dedicated lover of Schubert's music, the only identifiable Schubert march that he played in public was his adaptation of one of the two Marches caractéristiques (both in C major). The first version of the first Marche militaire that came to dominate the programs of pianists great and small appeared simultaneously in performance and print early in 1869. Its author was Carl Tausig, Liszt's greatest pupil. Having completed his keyboard tutelage in the 1850s and assuming a friendship with Brahms while residing in Vienna in the early 1860s, Tausig could lay claim to close relationships with the leading proponents of Schubert's music just as the composer's reputation was ascending along its nineteenth-century arc of fame. By the time Tausig introduced his arrangement, he had abandoned Vienna (where his advocacy for the music of Liszt and Wagner received a hostile critical response from Eduard Hanslick) for Berlin. There, he was rewarded with an appointment as Hofpianist to the Prussian king, Wilhelm I, in 1866, the same year he opened his Musikinstitut für Clavierspiel. When he performed the Marche militaire three years later, he had secured his position as one of Europe's most dazzling virtuosos.

There are discernible reasons why audiences would not have been surprised when Tausig played his Concertvortrag of Schubert's first Marche militaire. In the 1860s, the D. 733 set resurfaced often as Schubert's star was on the rise, notably in the ninth volume in a series of the composer's works published by Holle and edited by Friedrich Wilhelm Markull.