Why is Liszts transcription of Saint-Saens danse macabre different from the original one?
It’s a pity that, in english language writing on Liszt in particular, terribly sloppy usage of language & terminology has led to an almost universal adoption of ‘transcription’ as both a universal catch-all and a pejorative, all in one. To little illumination of anything and anyone beyond the self-satisfied demonstration of a notional Anglo-Saxon superiority of ‘taste’ with regards to such ‘mountebank’, ‘flashy’, ‘self-serving’ etc undertakings such as the virtuoso transcription. (For anyone with the stomach for it, I point to the ‘biography’ of Liszt by Ernest Newman as an object example of its miserable kind.) Liszt’s transcriptions divide into two, distinct categories or types: the ‘partitions’ — object examples the Bach organ works transcriptions and the Beethoven Symphonies — and the ‘paraphrases/reminiscences’, the touchstones for which among very many would be the ‘Don Juan’ and ‘Norma’ reminiscences or the ‘Rigoletto’ paraphrase, first among very many others. The objectives o
