Stephen Hough on the art of transcription

Transcriptions have long been common in jazz and hotel lounges, but in the classical world they were for many years a guilty pleasure. To arrange another composer’s music with extravagant decoration was often taken as a lapse of taste or even sacrilege. Liszt’s reworking of Mozart’s Don Giovanni into a blisteringly virtuosic potpourri summed up the dilemma: jaw‑dropping and entertaining, yet judged by many to be unserious.

Reworking others’ music, however, goes right back to the beginnings of written instrumental music. Elizabethan virginalists based keyboard variations on popular tunes; Bach transcribed Vivaldi concertos and wrote a fugue on a theme by Corelli; and composers from Beethoven to Brahms practised transformation as a central craft.

In the 19th century piano transcriptions split into two paths: domestic arrangements for amateur four‑hand performance, and public, virtuosic paraphrases by pianists such as Liszt and Thalberg.

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