16 TRANSCRIPTIONS & PARAPHRASES I discovered Felix Mendelssohn’s Die erste Walpurgisnacht (The First Walpurgis Night), a cantata for soloists, chorus and orchestra, during my very first year as a student at the Musikhochschule in Cologne. Choral singing was one of the compulsory courses for new arrivals, so I found myself in the choir. Inspired by a poem by Goethe, whose guest and friend the young Mendelssohn had been, the work describes the Druids’ attempts to practise their pagan rituals in the face of opposition from burgeoning Christianity. In this text about an oppressed minority, did Mendelssohn, who was of Jewish origin but converted to Protestantism, find an echo of his own situation? Or was he attracted by the supernatural colour, the ballad-like atmosphere that hovers over this work, and is embodied most notably in a capricious, diabolical scherzo? Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade is the masterpiece of an orchestral magician who wrote very little for the piano. The reference to One Thousand and One Nights is multiple: the musical evocation of an imaginary Orient, the lavishness of shimmering orchestration, and a certain structural correspondence with the literary model (a series of ‘tales’ interspersed with a recitative in which it is hard not to see the persuasive charm of Scheherazade herself). I have striven, in condensing the work, to retain its spirit, and to suggest by purely pianistic means the orchestral luxuriance that Rimsky-Korsakov invokes.
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