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Liszt wrote transcriptions for piano of a wide variety of music. He played many of them himself in his celebrated performances. In the mid-19th century, orchestral performances were much less common than they are today, and were not available at all outside major cities, so Liszt's transcriptions played a major role in popularizing a wide array of music such as the symphonies of Beethoven.[47]
When Liszt wrote transcriptions of works by other composers, he invested a lot of creativity in doing so. Instead of just overtaking original melodies and harmonies, he ameliorated them. In the case of his fantasies and transcriptions in the Italian style, composers such as Bellini and Donizetti knew that certain forms, usually periods of eight measures, were to be filled with music. Occasionally, while the first half of a period was composed with inspiration, the second half was added with mechanical routine. Liszt changed this by modifying the melody, bass and occasionally the harmonies.
Liszt's transcriptions yielded results that were often more inventive than what Liszt or the original composer could have achieved alone. Some notable examples are the Sonnambula-fantasy (Bellini), the Rigoletto-Paraphrase (Verdi), the Faust-Walzer (Gounod), and Réminiscences de Don Juan (Mozart). Hans von Bülow admitted that Liszt's transcription of his Dante Sonett "Tanto gentile" was much more refined than the original he himself had composed.[48] Liszt's transcriptions of Schubert songs, his fantasies on operatic melodies, and his piano arrangements of symphonies by Berlioz and Beethoven are other well-known examples of piano transcriptions
SOURCE: WIKIPEDIA
