Tausig: Das Geisterschiff "The Ghost Ship" [Rian de Waal]

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Das Geisterschiff, Op. 1c "The Ghost Ship" was composed around 1860, by then 19 years old, Carl Tausig. The Ghost Ship was written under the influence of the homonymous poem by Strachwitz.
The poem in question is a description of an encounter in a stormy sea between two boats, one with a human crew fighting to survive and a ghost ship of Vikings on another. The ghost ship is pointing directly to the North Pole; a place that represents purity and peace. Much about Tausig is revealed in his choosing such a powerful and strong poetry. This particular piece evidences young Tausig’s turbulent character, his inner Sturm und Drang and chaotic emotions. Later, dissatisfied with all his juvenile achievements, Tausig in one of his last outbursts bought back all the copies he could lay his hands on and burned them. During subsequent decades of donations, some libraries around the world, including the Library of Congress, received copies of the score from private collections, thus making it possible today to evaluate Tausig’s opera prima on its own merits.
Originally, The Ghost Ship was an orchestral piece. It was surprisingly well received, even the fearsome Hanslick, who later criticized Tausig so severely, was positive. Following a nineteenth century tradition, Tausig made an arrangement for piano solo, which is the only testimony left of this piece. Tausig’s transcription shows some interesting compositional devices such as the presence of whole tone scale, (in the midst of the nineteenth century!) a chromatic glissando, which made hear its first appearance in the history of the piano, and finally some strong influences of Richard Wagner.
In a letter to Ingeborg Stark in 1860, Liszt explained his views on the whole tone scale present in Tausig’s piece: “It is nothing but a very simple development of the scale, terrifying for all the long and protruding ears […] Tausig makes a very fine use in his Geisterschiff”
However the following chromatic glissando (2:05) was not destined to be so easily grasped by Liszt. Weissheimer, present in one of the famous matinees in the Altenburg, remembered when Tausig submitted his new opus for the first time: There was a passage so incredible that caused even Liszt a little trouble. It was an ascending chromatic glissando ending shrilly on a top black note! After a few vain attempts, Liszt finally said to Tausig: ‘Junge wie machts du das?’ (Young man how do you do this?) Tausig sat down, performed a glissando note on the white keys with the middle finger of his right hand, while at the same time making the fingers of his left hand, fly so cleverly over the black keys that a chromatic scale could be clearly be heard streaking like lightning up the whole length of the keyboard, ending on a high with a shrill ‘bip.’ Now Liszt addressed himself the problem again to the problem again, and after some half a dozen practice-runs he too achieved the desired ‘bip’ without any accident.
It is worth mentioning that some dissonances present in Tausig’s Ghost Ship sound much more aggressive and threatening on the piano. One of those is for sure the electrifying effect when the same motive is played half a step higher from F to F#. We can also have an idea how certain parts of his Tausig’s orchestration must have sound because he wrote Paukenartig, meaning like timpani.
Author: Giulio Draghi, 2013
Credits: ‪@thenameisgsarci‬ (score video)
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