David Stewart ([log in to unmask]) wrote:

>What a stupid thing to do!  What is the point in arranging something for a
>medium which only augments the experience the person playing it?
>
>Berlioz was one of the best if not THE best orchestrater ever.  Surely you
>only lose some of the art by playing it on a piano.

Actually one gains something - the way making a sketch of a painting can be
helpful, it underlines the structure of the work.  In Berlioz own time he
was often dismissed as *merely* an master of instrumentation, and that he
was only useful "in discovering effects which might be put to better use by
others" - in the words of one deFetis.

By transcription the soundness of the basic symphonic plan is revealed,
even if in places Liszt had to add to it where it was indeed weak.

It also produces the challenge of translating to the piano the effects
which Berlioz used an entire orchestra to achieve...

Stirling S Newberry
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