None but the Lonely Heart

“None But the Lonely Heart” is a song from Tchaikovsky's Six Romances, Op. 6 for voice and piano. The song is a setting in Russian translation of Goethe's poem “Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt,” which has attracted many composers, most famously Franz Schubert.

This is my second orchestration of music by Tchaikovsky, the first being Andante Cantabile from his String Quartet No. 1. I tried to make these transcriptions sound as if they had been orchestrated by the composer himself – as is also the case with my transcriptions of music by Rachmaninoff, Janácek, Bizet, and Revueltas. This is my natural tendency, following the spirit of the music. –José Serebrier