Die Zauberflöte

Joachim Andersen's "Operatic Transcriptions for Flute and Pianoforte, op. 45", though typical products of the bourgeois salons of the nineteenth Century, stand in a thoroughly respectable tradition whose origins reach far back into the past and which attained an unsurpassable culmination in the famous piano transcriptions of Franz Liszt. "Potpourris", as this type of domestic music-making can be called, often gave bourgeois music lovers of the time their only opportunity to become acquainted with and to discuss important or popular works by prominent "tone-poets" of die day. (For further information see Count Gallenberg's "Kleine Ballettmusik für zwei Flöten", available from the same publisher under the order number ZM 2625.) Carl Joachim Andersen (1847-1909) was one of the most important and internationally best regarded flautists of his day; in later years he also performed as a conductor. His numerous pedagogical and recital pieces for flute stand well above the qualitative level of the virtuoso and salon music being mass-produced at the time. These works reveal him to have been a composer with taste, a strong sense of form and a mastery of harmony.