# PABST Opera and Ballet Paraphrases Pavel PABST (1854-1897) Opera and Ballet Paraphrases Fantaisie sur l’opéra Mazeppa (Tchaikovsky) Paraphrase de concert sur l’opéra Eugene — Onegin (Tchaikovsky) Réminiscences de l’opéra Le Démon, Grand Fantaisie (Rubinstein) Paraphrase de concert sur le ballet La Belle au bois dormant (Tchaikovsky) “Berceuse” (Tchaikovsky Op. 16 No. 1)
Illustrations de l’opéra La Dame de Pique (Tchaikovsky)
Oleg Marshev, piano
Recorded at the Cultural Institute, Milan, September 1996
DANACORD DACOCD450 [67:39]
We need to talk about paraphrase.
Not the kind where you restate someone’s argument in freshman composition class, but the glittering, now-unfashionable nineteenth-century practice of taking operatic and balletic materials and refashioning them into virtuoso piano showpieces. It’s a genre that makes modern listeners—and more than a few critics—uncomfortable. The objection runs something like this: it’s derivative, it’s superficial — it’s mere display.
Better to play Brahms, or Beethoven, or even Liszt’s original compositions than these second-hand confections. But that objection misses the point entirely, and — well — Pavel Pabst’s paraphrases, magnificently served here by Oleg Marshev, make the case for reconsideration with considerable force. Pabst remains a shadowy figure even to specialists.
Born in Königsberg in 1854, he studied with Liszt and settled in Moscow, where he taught at the Conservatory—Medtner and Liapunov were among his pupils. Tchaikovsky trusted him to edit his piano works. Rachmaninoff sought him out as a duo partner.
He died in 1897, just forty-three years old, leaving behind a body of work that includes original compositions (a piano concerto, chamber music) but is remembered, when it’s remembered at all, for these operatic and balletic fantasias. The biographical record is thin; Danacord’s liner notes offer almost nothing, which is frustrating given the label’s usual thoroughness. What we have instead is the music itself, and it speaks with considerable eloquence.
Consider the context. In the 1870s and 1880s, when Pabst was active, the piano transcription served a vital cultural function. Provincial audiences couldn’t easily hear Eugene Onegin or Sleeping Beauty—couldn’t travel to Moscow or St.
The warm acoustics of the concert hall seem to breathe through the disc.
Petersburg for every premiere. But they could hear Pabst play his paraphrases in a local salon or modest concert hall, and suddenly Tchaikovsky’s melodies, his harmonic language, his theatrical gestures became accessible. The paraphrase was democratic in a way we’ve forgotten: it brought high culture to the middle classes, made opera and ballet portable.
More than that, though—and this is where the form gets interesting—the paraphrase was a creative act in its own right. Not mere arrangement, not simple transcription, but genuine reimagining. Pabst takes Tchaikovsky’s materials and subjects them to pianistic transformation: octave doublings in both hands, elaborate figuration, harmonic enrichment, textural layering that exploits the instrument’s capacity for simultaneous melodic lines.
The Eugene Onegin Paraphrase, probably his best-known work, shows the craft beautifully. Tatyana’s letter scene emerges transformed—not diminished, but refracted through the prism of virtuoso pianism, its emotional content heightened rather than diluted by the technical elaboration. The Sleeping Beauty Paraphrase operates differently.
Here Pabst works with Tchaikovsky’s most sumptuous orchestral writing, and the challenge is to suggest—impossibly, but somehow he does it—the sheen of massed strings, the glitter of woodwinds, the weight of brass. The famous waltz arrives wreathed in arpeggios that shimmer like stage lighting. Is it the same as hearing the ballet in the theater?
Of course not. But it’s not trying to be. It’s offering a different pleasure: the intimacy of a single performer conjuring an entire world from eighty-eight keys.
Marshev understands this implicitly. His playing has the necessary virtuosity—these pieces are fiendishly difficult, full of wide leaps, rapid passage-work, polyphonic textures that require absolute independence of hands—but he never lets the difficulty show. That’s the paradox of great pianism: the harder the music, the more effortless it should sound.
Marshev achieves that ideal consistently across this generous program. Listen to the way he voices the inner lines in the Mazeppa Fantaisie, bringing out harmonic details that lesser pianists would bury in a wash of pedal. Or the delicacy he brings to Tchaikovsky’s “Berceuse,” the one transcription rather than paraphrase on the; disc, where the original’s simplicity must be preserved even as it’s translated into more elaborate keyboard textures.
The Démon Grand Fantaisie, based on Rubinstein’s opera, offers something different: a glimpse into the Russian repertoire that never quite established itself internationally. Rubinstein’s melodic gift was considerable—more considerable, arguably, than his dramatic or structural sense—and Pabst cherry-picks the best material with shrewd judgment. The result is a fifteen-minute fantasia that captures whatever was worth capturing from a four-hour opera, and does so without apology.
This is curation as creation. There’s a scholarly point worth making here about the relationship between composer and paraphraser. Pabst wasn’t some hack capitalizing on Tchaikovsky’s fame (though plenty of hacks did exactly that).
He was Tchaikovsky’s colleague, his trusted editor, someone who understood the older composer’s idiom from inside. These paraphrases aren’t parasitic; they’re collaborative, even if the collaboration was tacit. They extend Tchaikovsky’s reach, amplify his voice, make his theatrical works available in domestic spaces.
That’s not a minor achievement. The recording, made in Milan in 1996, captures Marshev’s Steinway with admirable clarity. The acoustic is on the dry side—more studio
