Where does a piece of music live? Not on the page, as Ferruccio Busoni—who features prominently this afternoon—asserted in his 1907 Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music. Every notation, he wrote, is already a transcription of an abstract idea; the moment a composer sets pen to paper, the original conception is compromised, reduced to the constraints of a particular instrument. Given this, the step from one transcription to another is “comparatively short and unimportant.” Music belongs neither solely to the composer’s imagination nor the performer’s living presence. It exists somewhere beyond both, boundless, waiting to be summoned again. Two-thirds of this afternoon’s works are transcriptions, and this is not merely a programming curiosity but a deliberate arc.
The program opens with a declaration. J.S. Bach’s Chaconne in D minor—the final movement of his Partita No. 2 for solo violin—is among the supreme achievements in Western music. Johannes Brahms marveled that on a single stave for a small instrument, Bach had written “a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings.” Its structure is elemental: a four-bar harmonic pattern stated and subjected to continuous variation across three broad sections, minor giving way to a luminous major plateau before returning to the depths. Bach completed the autograph in 1720, the same year he returned from a trip to Carlsbad to find that his wife of 13 years had died and been buried in his absence. What followed was a manuscript with 256 bars of relentless transformation.
Busoni’s piano transcription, premiered in Boston in January 1893 and revised until 1916, does not attempt to imitate the violin—or the organ, as earlier transcribers Liszt and Tausig approached Bach’s keyboard works. His is a conceptual transcription: He expands the Chaconne into an orchestral-pianistic vision exploiting what the modern piano does uniquely—rhythmic precision, dynamic range, capacity to sustain a line while simultaneously pulsing with inner voices. The result is “neither Bach arranged by Busoni nor Busoni after Bach,” but a hyphenated entity of equal authorship. The work has divided opinion ever since. For some listeners it violates; for others it reveals harmonic and dramatic implications four strings can only suggest. The controversy, still unresolved, is part of the work’s meaning.
César Franck composed the Prélude, Fugue et Variation around 1860, when his reputation rested almost entirely on his improvisations at the Cavaillé-Coll organ of the Basilique Sainte-Clotilde in Paris. Franz Liszt, hearing the Six pièces pour grand orgue in which it appears, declared that the works deserve a place beside Bach’s masterpieces. The piece is intimate in scale: a haunting stepwise melody over a lilting 9/8 meter, a fugue whose subject keeps the vocal quality, and the opening melody returning over rippling arabesques—three parts, arch-shaped, quietly radiant. The version we hear today is the luminous solo piano transcription published by British pianist Harold Bauer in 1910. Bauer’s approach is faithful and restrained, making no attempt to overwhelm the piano with imitated organ thunder.
The beloved chorale prelude Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland belongs to Bach’s Great Eighteen Chorale Preludes, revised in Leipzig from Weimar originals dating to the early 1710s. The melody is Luther’s German paraphrase of a fourth-century Advent hymn summoning the Savior into the world. Bach’s setting is one of mystical suspension: two inner voices moving in canon, a walking bass beneath, and the chorale melody above in such luxurious ornamentation that nine notes of a single phrase become 103 separately articulated ones, the melody endlessly prolonged, perpetually yearning. Busoni transcribed the prelude in 1898, aiming to bring these works to audiences who wouldn’t otherwise encounter them on the organ. He succeeded beyond his imagining: Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky placed this transcription at the center of his 1972 sci-fi film Solaris, where it becomes an emblem of memory and longing.
The first half concludes with the Toccata and Fugue in D minor, and here the program’s argument acquires a particular irony: This is the most famous organ work in history, and its authorship is genuinely uncertain. Scholars have long disputed the J.S. Bach attribution. Others have proposed that the work originated as a piece for solo violin, which would give it a curious kinship with the afternoon’s opening work. Busoni, who called his toccata transcriptions “the best among my achievements of this kind,” apparently had no such doubts, publishing his version in 1900 with the same orchestral imagination he brings to the Chaconne. The question remains open; no autograph survives. There is a resonance in closing our first half with music so famous it has become its own transcription, endlessly reproduced, the original perhaps forever lost.
After intermission, the program turns to Frédéric Chopin. His Prelude in C-sharp minor, Op. 45, composed at George Sand’s country estate at Nohant in 1841, stands entirely apart from the famous 24 Preludes of Op. 28. The lovely work is an extended single meditation—five minutes that give the impression of improvisation notated in real time, constantly modulating, visiting virtually every key while remaining coherent at each moment. Near the end, a cadenza weaves through chains of dominant sevenths and diminished chords in what feels like a reluctant return to earth. Chopin wrote to his copyist with unusual satisfaction: “It is well modulated, isn’t it?” Sand recorded the composer telling painter Eugène Delacroix, “Nothing’s coming to me, nothing but reflections, shadows, reliefs that won’t settle. I’m looking for the color, but I can’t even find the outline.” Delacroix replied, “You won’t find one without the other, and you’re going to find them both.” Op. 45 sounds like both.
Now we step back 15 years. The Rondo à la Mazur (“in the manner of a Mazurka”) was written when Chopin was 16 and freshly enrolled at the Warsaw Conservatory. In this work, classical rondo form marries Polish national dance, a young composer announcing that he intends to bring the two worlds into productive conversation. The displaced rhythms, sharpened fourth degree from the Lydian mode of Polish folk music absorbed during village summers—all of it is here in embryo, already characteristic and personal. Schumann called this piece “lovely, enthusiastic, and full of grace…the ideal introduction to Chopin.”
Chopin composed 19 songs to Polish texts, almost none of which he brought forth in his lifetime. After his death in 1849, his friend Julian Fontana published them posthumously, and Franz Liszt immediately transcribed six as the Six chants polonais. For Liszt, to transcribe was to liberate—to carry music from the private sphere into the public one, from Warsaw parlors into European concert halls. Meine Freuden (“My Joys”) sets a love lyric to poetry by Adam Mickiewicz. Liszt’s version has a nocturne-like tenderness, surrounding Chopin’s vocal melody with Lisztian ornament and harmonic enrichment. Mädchens Wunsch (“The Maiden’s Wish”)—one of only two Chopin songs published in his lifetime—opens simply, then escalates through variations of increasing intensity until Liszt’s characteristic octaves arrive to make what was intimate (“If I were the sun shining in the sky, I would shine only for you”) suddenly extroverted and exhilarating.
Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 is arguably the most famous piano showpiece ever written—immortalized by concert virtuosos and cartoon rabbits in equally improbable proportions. Its structure mirrors the verbunkos dance tradition of Romani musicians Liszt heard from childhood: lassan (slow section), dark and march-like, improvisatory and precisely notated at once; then friska (fast section), building relentlessly until the main theme blazes through in major, cimbalom textures hammered across the keyboard. What distinguishes this afternoon’s performance is Liszt’s own marking near the end of the friska: Cadenza ad lib. This is an explicit offer for the performer to improvise or compose an original passage before the final prestissimo. Most pianists decline. Rachmaninoff wrote a cadenza still widely printed, and Marc-André Hamelin composed a celebrated cadenza known for its wit and originality. This afternoon, Sofya Gulyak performs her own, her answer to an invitation that has been open for nearly two centuries.
This choice is the program’s culmination and most personal statement. Gulyak joins the company of pianist-creators—Busoni, who extended Bach’s harmonic implications beyond what four strings could sustain; Bauer, who recognized Franck’s organ work as latent piano music; Liszt, who heard Chopin’s private songs as a concert hall waiting to happen. Each of them understood through their creative acts that transcription is not diminishment but continuation. A great musical idea is never finished, only waiting for the next intelligence to carry it forward. When Gulyak breathes her own voice into the silence of the Cadenza ad lib marking, she is not departing from the program’s logic. She is, at last and inevitably, finally and thrillingly, completing it.
Program notes by Matt Goodrich
