Gotterdammerung: Siegfried's Funeral March (my transcription)

[ronde_des_sylphes]

There are some other transcriptions of this famous piece from Wagner’s Ring Cycle for solo piano, but I quite fancied trying my hand at writing my own.

It's a home recording and thus acoustically it's not ideal, but maybe I'll get the chance to record it in more favourable circumstances. Anyway, hopefully it might be an interesting project for others to hear. Wagner weaves copious leitmotifs into the orchestral texture which I have done my best to replicate.

[essence]

Maybe tune the piano?

[ronde_des_sylphes]

It was tuned two months ago but the treble hasn't held as well as I would have liked.

[andhow04]

There are some other transcriptions of this famous piece from Wagner’s Ring Cycle for solo piano, but I quite fancied trying my hand at writing my own.

It's a home recording and thus acoustically it's not ideal, but maybe I'll get the chance to record it in more favourable circumstances. Anyway, hopefully it might be an interesting project for others to hear. Wagner weaves copious leitmotifs into the orchestral texture which I have done my best to replicate.

i listened and enjoyed it, though it's not an excerpt that works best on piano for wagner.. maybe some tremolos can be activated into arpeggios or something? the orchestra has so many crescendi on static chords, just hard to get across. but i think you did the best that can be done.. does gould do this one? or just the rhine journey. i cannot remember

[ronde_des_sylphes]

Thanks for the thoughts. I used mainly tremolandi (in places there's a short arpeggiated lead-in to the tremolandi) largely because it's easier to control a cresc. swell within a tremolando, and because I feel that arpeggios suit a more gentle type of material (eg bel canto) better than tremolandi. Nevertheless, food for thought. Busoni uses quite a lot of rh glissandi in his transcription and I don't particularly like them; I also had a look at a transcription of the full opera (!) by Kleinmichel: whilst it's an amazing thing to have done I thought it was more literal/functional than I wanted. Gould transcribed the Rhine Journey (and the Siegfried-Idyll plus the Meistersinger prelude) but not this.

Thanks again for listening.