The Godowsky Collection, Vol. 2.

The Godowsky Collection, Vol. 2, edited by Millan Sachania. Carl Fischer (65 Bleecker St., New York, NY 10012), 2001. 439 pp., $49.95. Difficult.

The Godowsky Collection, Vol. 2, is a collection of Godowsky's transcriptions and arrangements of selections from the music of Schubert and J.S. Bach and cadenzas for three Mozart concertos. Among the pieces by Schubert are twelve of his best-loved songs arranged for piano solo, along with a complex F-sharp minor version of the F-minor Moment Musical, D. 780, No. 3, and a transcription of ballet music from Rosamunde, D. 797. Transcriptions of Bach's first three Sonatas for Unaccompanied Violin, and the second, third and fifth Suites for Unaccompanied Violoncello follow. The volume concludes with two cadenzas for Mozart's Concerto in E-flat Major for Two Pianos, K. 365, a cadenza for his Concerto in A Major, K. 488, and two cadenzas for the Concerto in C Minor, K. 491.

The Introductory Essay and Biographical Sketch by Godowsky scholar and editor Millan Sachania are the most valuable aspects of this enormous tome, indeed worth the $49.95 purchase price, for libraries, musicologists, performing artists and teachers interested in sharpening their perspective on the style and performance practices of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Sachania includes Godowsky's forewords to the first editions of these works, giving us his musical philosophy, performance suggestions and insight into the humility and reverence with which he approached the masterworks he transcribed and elaborated.

Godowsky's elaborations (his preferred term) commanded the respect of the greatest artists of his time. According to Sachania, Rachmaninoff referred to Godowsky as "the only musician of this age who has given a lasting, a real contribution to the development of piano music." Sachania further relates that great pianists, Josef Hofmann, Theodor Leschetizky and Vladimir de Pachmann, expressed their profoundest admiration for Godowsky's playing of his Chopin arrangements, whose difficulties seemed inconceivable to them. With such documentation of the value of the mind that produced the music that follows, the volume proceeds with the Schubert song transcriptions.

Each Schubert song is prefaced by the original melody and all of the verses, attesting to Godowsky's respect for the originals and his need to share the import of the texts with the performer.

The most intriguing aspect of Godowsky's transcriptions evidenced in both ...