Liszt as Musical Engraver, Translator, and Colorist

Abstract This essay investigates Liszt’s arrangements of the existing instrumental sounds and effects on the piano. Drawing on the discipline of French visual cultural history, this chapter situates Liszt’s sonic reworkings within the nineteenth century’s broader interest in visual art reproduction. Musical analyses illustrate that Liszt experimented with a wide array of adjustments, alterations, and radical transformations, revealing his fidelity to the original and his creativity as an arranger. He reconceived the piano as an instrument capable of suggesting the coloristic effects of particular orchestral instruments from strings to timpani, the organ, and Hungarian folk instruments, such as fiddle and cimbalom. All in all, Liszt fashioned his role as a musical engraver, translator, interpreter, and colorist to make the reproduction in “black and white” as vibrant and alive as the original.