The Romantic repertoires in accompanied song and music for piano solo are closely intertwined in many ways. Mendelssohn (or possibly his sister, Fanny Hensel) conceived the notion of ‘Songs without Words’ for piano alone; Schumann took to writing Lieder partly as a reaction to the damage done to his hand by an ill-advised ‘strengthening’ contraption which put paid to his ambitions as a concert soloist; and composers as diverse as Schubert, Brahms, Fauré, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Medtner and Debussy were prolific as creators both of song and of piano solo music. One relative exception is Richard Strauss (1864-1949), whose songs and early Violin Sonata show that he could write well for the piano, but whose passion and genius for orchestration probably deflected him from the keyboard – at any rate, he wrote little for the piano alone and virtually nothing after the age of twenty.
I had long deplored this gap in the Strauss output when, in 1982, the dell’Arte record label issued a vinyl disc of the great American pianist Earl Wild performing a dozen of his own piano solo transcriptions of songs by Sergei Rachmaninov. I was riveted: one is familiar with the phrase ‘don’t shoot the pianist (he is doing his best)’ – but here was a pianist striking a blow in retaliation. If not actually applying both barrels to the singer, Wild was at least dispensing with their services. This he did by absorbing the vocal line of Rachmaninov’s songs into an already busy piano part, while taking the opportunity to elaborate the composer’s original keyboard layout, out of either pragmatic necessity or pure creative caprice.
The trouble with many songs is that, much as one might wish they existed in alternative forms for piano alone, their sheer brevity militates against transcription for recital use. Clearly recognising this, Wild had hit on the sensible expedient of doubling the length of the shortest songs and then conceiving the second half as a variation of the first. To this he added the notion of fashioning a key-change from the prevailing tonic tonality, towards the end of the existing song original, and then reversing that process towards the concluding stages of the extended score. The tonal organization of the resulting piece thus carried a plausible and convincing semblance of a sonata form, while its increased duration made it a more credible self-contained statement than an unadulterated voiceless transcription would have been.
In the early 1980s, under Wild’s influence, I made two transcriptions of Rachmaninov songs, both making considerable demands upon the player’s virtuosity as I varied the octave register of the vocal line within the piano writing. In 1991 I found myself eyeing the song Cäcilie, opus 27 no. 2, composed by Richard Strauss in 1894 and orchestrated by him three years later. This song is passionate, memorable, stirring …and very short. Wild’s solution naturally suggested itself, and I set about expanding things to suit my own purposes (in the original situation, a recital encore). In the score herewith, Strauss’s original introduction is extended backwards by four bars which serve to present a competing tonality a semitone above the original key of E major. Keyboard layout is greatly expanded throughout the Paraphrase, but the kernel of harmonic movement and melody remains that conceived by Strauss, until his song material runs out at bar 61. Bars 61-78 are entirely my own impersonation of the composer, in the interests of fashioning a feasible migration to the flattened mediant key of G major. Bars 79-120 are an oblique shadowing of the original song, but include a cadenza-like interruption at bars 106-111. At bar 120 the introduction recurs, leading into a brief headlong coda.