Ode To Music

Having written a wind quintet for the Dorians, upon which they lavished playing of great precision and elegance, I was warmly disposed towards them. So it was no surprise when, in a burst of friendship I blurted out, "Is there a piece of music you all wished-no dreamed-had been written for wind quintet? I will transcribe for your Quintet anything you choose".

After much conversation the players settled upon Shubert's song "An die Musik" - a little miracle in two verses which is often the last song sung on the last recital of a distinguished lieder singer's concluding career.

My dear friend and piano-champion, Marc Peloquin, heard this arrangement and posited: "David, I think it would also sound well on the piano". He began then to transcribe my transcription which started me thinking: Could this become the basis of a grand piano fantasy much as, in 1978, I transmuted my chaste Acrostic Song into a gleaming, grandiose Virtuoso Alice? Yes, I decided, it could work and set to the task quickly and with passion.

To Music is the result- 9 minutes that Franz Schubert might have written had he been enamored of Richard Wagner and at the same time a piano student of Franz Liszt!

– DAVID DEL TREDICI

The American composer David Del Tredici, who died in 2023, first turned his attention to Franz Schubert's song "An die Musik" in 2012 with a distinctive adaptation for woodwind quintet, which was premiered by the Dorian Wind Quintet in January 2013. Two years later, at the suggestion of pianist Marc Peloquin, he arranged the work for solo piano and titled it "Ode to Music." Schubert had set the poem "An die Musik" by his friend Franz von Schober to music in March 1817 (as D 547). Del Tredici frames his neo-Romantic, harmonically extensive adaptations with a prelude and a postlude.