Songs for piano alone: a look at Franz Liszt’s Buch der Lieder für Piano allein Books I and II

Abstract

Music circles have often questioned the artistic integrity of piano transcriptions: should they should be on the same par as “original works” or are they merely imitations of somebody else’s work? Franz Liszt produced hundreds of piano transcriptions of works by other composers making him one of the leading piano transcriptionists of all time. While transcriptions are the results of rethinking and remolding pre-existing materials, how should we view the “transcriptions” of the composer’s own original work? Liszt has certainly taken much of his original non-piano works and transcribed them for solo piano. But would these really be transcriptions, or different versions? This thesis explores the question of how transcriptions of Liszt’s own works should be treated, particularly the solo piano pieces in the two books of Buch der Lieder für Piano allein. While some pieces are clearly transcriptions of previous art songs, some pieces should really be characterized as independent piano pieces first before art songs.