In spring 1838, Franz Liszt made his first appearances before the Viennese public with a selection of his transcriptions of Schubert’s Lieder for pianoforte. The performances unleashed veritable storms of applause from audiences and critics alike; some of the rapturous reviews even claimed that the music of Schubert, who had died ten years earlier, only became intelligible through Liszt’s playing. Liszt’s transcriptions were meant to transfer Schubert’s piano writing effectively to the new generation of concert grands. Their formidable virtuosity, which was frequently criticised in later years, was only superficially an end in itself, however. Instead, Liszt viewed virtuosity as a vehicle for obtaining the maximum expression appropriate to the original and for capturing the emotive quality of Schubert’s music. His precepts as an editor of Schubert’s piano music were of a different nature. Unlike contemporary editions, the Schubert volumes that Liszt prepared for the Stuttgart publishing house Cotta around 1870 are exemplary in quality and indicate every editorial intervention, while also being devoid of the arbitrary additions common to the subjectively tinged performance tradition of his generation. This chapter provides a thorough study of Liszt’s approach to Schubert’s music, while also considering the reception of his adaptations and editions.

Schubert was fond of writing four-hand music to be played by two pianists sitting on the same piano bench. His thirty-four compositions in this medium range from the earliest extant composition in his hand (a Fantasy penned in 1810) to his Rondo in A Major finished in the summer of 1828. No composer ever approached the piano duet with the seriousness Schubert did, and his corpus of four-hand pieces stands as the apex of the genre. The four-hand configuration seemed ideally suited to his temperament, as it was a congenial form of music-making that was emblematic in Biedermeier culture as an activity of friendship and sociability. It is thus not surprising that these works were a staple in his Schubertiads and ranked among his most successful publications during his lifetime. But the four-handed configuration was also a critical medium for the transmission and reception of much of his orchestral and chamber music. The many piano transcriptions of Schubert’s instrumental music arranged for four-hands issued by publishers over the course of the nineteenth century allowed any two decently practised amateur pianists a chance to get to know his music by reproducing it in the domestic space of the bourgeois parlour.

Chapter 2 deals with methodological preliminaries and introduces the central theoretical concepts. It begins by outlining the extra-linguistic historical background regarding the present habitat of Central Chadic languages. It identifies the exceptional typology of Central Chadic languages, in particular regarding their enigmatic vocalic domain. The chapter introduces the problems of applying the classic comparative method and explains the value of internal reconstruction. It discusses problems of dealing with various formats of data transcription, and it introduces central notions such as vowel epenthesis, weak radicals, vocalisation, and prosodies. Finally, it positions the current study against the background of previous studies on the subject.