Take some music,
start to fake some music in a lag time
Then you have some ragtime.
Steal from the masters any classic you see
Rag it a little bit with his melody
Don't try at all to hide
Call it the Gaby Glide(83)
No matter what it may be.
Other writers will give brother writers inspiration
Handy op'ra will be dandy just for syncopation.

(Louis A. Hirsch: The Bacchanal Rag, 1912)

This could be the longest chapter but I promise to be brief. There are many classical works (I have already mentioned a few of them) that became hits in ragtime and/or jazz version throughout America. Of course, most of them were popular in their original form, mainly because of the piano rolls. The above text of a ragtime song picked as motto of the chapter proves how impertinently classical evergreens were plagiarized and transformed by ragtime and jazz musicians.

Chopin’s Funeral March was reborn a bit strangely in Funeral Rag by Max Kortlander (1890-1961). The most interesting version of the other Chopin evergreen, Revolutionary Etude can be found in Ragtime Nightingale by Joseph Lamb with a strongly transformed version of the original melody. The slightly changed middle section of Fantasie-Impromptu is Harry Carroll’s I'm Always Chasing Rainbows itself. (This tune was a big hit in America sung by the Hungarian-born Dolly Sisters.)(84)

Sergei Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C sharp minor was a big hit especially after Geroge L. Cobb (1886-1942) ragged up the original melody in his Russian Rag in 1918. The tune then was played not only by pianists but orchestras as well. One of its best renditions is the recording by the dixieland band of Sydney and Wilbur de Paris.

Among Menddelssohn’s works obviously Midsummer’s Night Dream, of which many adaptations exist, became a hit. Zez Confrey’s Midsummer’s Nightmare was probably the most inventive. The other favourite was Spring Song that inspired Irving Berlin’s That Mesmerizing Mendelssohn Tune (1909), Paul Charles Pratt’s (1890-1948) Spring-Time Rag (1916) while Zez Confrey kept the original title (1925).

Confrey never denied the sources of his ‘transformed’ works. What’s more, he published the original themes before his tunes. He did so with Robert Schumann’s Träumerei (1925) and Anton Rubinstein’s Melody In F (1925). He put together a little medley of Tchaikovsky’s works, entitled Piano Sketch of a Symphony Orchestra - A Little Story of Tchaikowsky (1959). Rubinstein’s Melody in F inspired Melody Rag by Charles Leslie Johnson (under the pseudonym Raymond Birch) in 1911.

Probably the most popular piece was Dvořák’s Humoresque.(85) Two stand out from among many of its ‘transcriptions’: Humorestless by Zez Confrey (1925) and a unique recording: in the trio of Bix Beiderbecke, Frank Trumbauer and Eddie Lang, besides the C-melody saxophone of Trumbauer and the guitar playing of Lang, Beiderbecke switches from cornet to piano (he really changes instruments, there is no technical trick). The piece was recorded in 1927 entitled For No Reason At All In C and it is, in fact, an improvisation on I'd Climb The Highest Mountain by Brown and Clare, which is based on Humoresque.

I have not yet mentioned the many versions of Liszt’s Liebestraum of which the 1937 adaptation of the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra stands out. Obviously the 2nd Hungarian Rhapsody (its ‘Friska’ part) is the most commonly played, used, transcribed and transformed work of all Liszt pieces. Hungarian Rag by Julius Lenzberg might be the closest to the original and it is also one of its most popular versions (among pianists, orchestras and recording labels, as well). Many say that Rhapsody Rag (1911) by Harry Jentes is also an adaptation of the Liszt-work but I found no similarities at all between the two.

It is interesting to know that motion picture companies worked with a limited variety of pre-recorded music that included only a few classical pieces such as the 2nd Hungarian Rhapsody and Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C sharp minor. Later other works, too were included in the ‘film music repertoire’: Spanish capriccio, Introduction and Tarantella (Pablo de Sarasate) and Carnival in Venice. Among the ragtime pieces Kitten On The Keys (Zez Confrey) was the most popular. And there is no need to say that these works were heard many, many times by the ‘victims’ of the cinema craze, i.e. millions of Americans.

Of course, there are many rags where one cannot be a hundred percent sure if the melody is ragging a classical theme or it is just similar to one. One of the best examples for this is the beginning of Beethoven’s op. 31. no. 2. D minor piano sonata that seems to be included in James Scott’s Rag Sentimental (1918). (Example 24 and 25) Even though the similarity makes the origin obvious, there are no direct references so we can only guess... The list of classical pieces ever turned into ragtime and jazz could be continued for long but it might be clear from these examples how much classical composers were present in ragtime and later in swing.