Liszt’s Representation of Instrumental Sounds on the Piano: Colors in Black and White

Liszt’s adaptation of existing music is staggering in its quantity, scope, and variety of technique. He often viewed the model work as a source that he strove to improve, rival, and even surpass. Liszt’s Representation of Instrumental Sounds on the Piano: Colors in Black and White provides a comprehensive survey of Liszt’s reworking of instrumental music on the piano, particularly his emulation of tone colors and idiomatic gestures. The book relatesLiszt’s sonic reproductions to the widespread nineteenth-century interest in visual-art reproduction. Hyun Joo Kim illustrates Liszt’s diverse approaches to the integrity of the music in a detailed, vivid, and insightful manner through close study of his arrangements of Beethoven’s symphonies and Rossini’s Guillaume Tell Overture, his two-piano arrangements of his own symphonic poems such as Mazeppa and Hunnenschlacht, and his Hungarian Rhapsodies. By examining orchestral music and Hungarian Gypsy-style music as sources of Liszt’s sound representations, this book reveals Liszt’s musical discourse as straddling the musical, cultural, and aesthetic divides between mainstream and peripheral, art and folk, serious and popular.

HYUN JOO KIM holds a PhD from Indiana University and is an independent scholar in Seoul, South Korea.