3 - Transcriptions: Edification and Entertainment

Summary

I enjoyed the music which the orchestra furnished us, particularly that Schubert's Military March, which Margaret used to teach me how to play—I played one end of the duet and she played the other. She was always telling me how to do it—and she does that yet—and so does her mother.

—Harry S. Truman

The musical traits of the Marche militaire and the growing stature of its composer attracted listeners to both solo recitals and concerts by orchestras, professional and amateur, and bands, military and civic. Virtuoso pianists and ambitious conductors shared similar aesthetic goals in programming the piece. To be sure, once it entered the cultural bloodstream, Tausig's solo piano arrangement was bound to enjoy far wider dissemination than transcriptions for large ensembles, due to the more substantial demands of personnel, logistics, and financing that encumbered the maintenance of the latter. The statistics for orchestral and band performances do not come close to matching those for the keyboard enumerated in the previous chapter; nonetheless, such performances contributed significantly to the work's ubiquitous popularity. Its status benefited from the synergy between Schubert's burgeoning reputation and musical organizations, which promoted lofty goals that had both civic and artistic ends.

Orchestras in Europe

Although the most pervasive guise for the Marche militaire came in Tausig's arrangement, an adaptation for orchestra anticipated it by nearly a decade. On September 22, 1860, August Manns concluded a concert at the Crystal Palace with the “first time of performance” of what a later notice described as his own “very brilliant execution of Schubert's ‘Marche Militaire,’ arranged for full orchestra by Mr. Manns.” His Victorian contemporaries recognized Manns as the musician responsible for introducing most of Schubert's orchestral compositions to English audiences. Yet the appearance of his transcription still may have struck listeners as something of a novelty, because this march was among the earliest works by Schubert that Manns conducted after giving the British premiere of the Ninth Symphony in 1856.