(Cambridge Companions To Music) Hamilton, Kenneth (Ed.) - The Cambridge Companion To Liszt-Cambridge University Press (2005)

The Cambridge Companion to Liszt
This Companion provides an up-to-date view of the music of Franz

Liszt, its contemporary context and performance practice, written by
some of the leading specialists in the field of nineteenth-century
music studies. Although a core of Liszt’s piano music has always
maintained a firm hold on the repertoire, his output was so vast,
influential and multi-faceted that scholarship too has taken some
time to assimilate his achievement. This book offers students and
music lovers some of the latest views in an accessible form. Katharine
Ellis, Alexander Rehding and James Deaville present the biographical
and intellectual aspects of Liszt’s legacy; Kenneth Hamilton, James
Baker and Anna Celenza give a detailed account of Liszt’s piano
music, including approaches to performance; Monika Hennemann
discusses Liszt’s Lieder; and Reeves Shulstad and Dolores Pesce
survey his orchestral and choral music.
ken n et h h a m i lto n is pianist-in-residence and senior lecturer in

music at the University of Birmingham, UK. A virtuoso pianist with
an international reputation, he is also an authority on Liszt and has a
special interest in nineteenth-century performing techniques. He is
the author of the Cambridge Music handbook Liszt: Sonata in B
Minor.
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The Cambridge Companion to
LISZT
............
edited by
Kenneth Hamilton
c a m b r i d ge u n iver s i t y pre s s
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The Cambridge Companion to Liszt / edited by Kenneth Hamilton.
p. cm. – (Cambridge companions to music)
Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
ISBN 0 521 62204 2 – ISBN 0 521 64462 3 (pb.)
1. Liszt, Franz, 1811–1886 – Criticism and interpretation. I. Hamilton, Kenneth, 1963– II. Series.
ML410.L7C25 2004
780 .92 – dc22
[B] 2004040793
ISBN-13 978-0-521-62204-2 hardback

ISBN-10 0-521-62204-2 hardback
ISBN-13 978-0-521-64462-4 paperback

ISBN-10 0-521-64462-3 paperback
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Contents
List of illustrations [page vi]

Notes on contributors [vii]
Preface [ix]
Acknowledgements [xi]
Chronology [xii]
1 Liszt: the Romantic artist Katharine Ellis [1]

2 Inventing Liszt’s life: early biography and autobiography Alexander
Rehding [14]
3 Liszt and the twentieth century James Deaville [28]
4 Liszt’s early and Weimar piano works Kenneth Hamilton [57]
5 Liszt’s late piano works: a survey James M. Baker [86]
6 Liszt’s late piano works: larger forms James M. Baker [120]
7 Liszt’s piano concerti: a lost tradition Anna Celenza [152]
8 Performing Liszt’s piano music Kenneth Hamilton [171]
9 Liszt’s Lieder Monika Hennemann [192]
10 Liszt’s symphonic poems and symphonies Reeves Shulstad [206]
11 Liszt’s sacred choral music Dolores Pesce [223]
Notes [249]
Select bibliography [271]
Index of Liszt’s musical works [272]
General index [276]
[v]
Illustrations
Plates
1.1 Josef Danhauser, Liszt am Flügel (1840), oil. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin –
Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Nationalgalerie/F.V. 42. Photo: Jürgen Liepe [9]
7.1 ‘The Equality of Death’ from Hans Holbein’s Todtentanz [165]
7.2 Trionfo della Morte, by Orcagna [sic] (Francesco Traini or Bonamico
Buffalmacco) [166]
7.3 First page of Liszt’s 1849 version of Totentanz (New York), Pierpont Morgan
Library, Lehman Collection [168]
Examples
2.1 Liszt, Beethoven Cantata no. 1. Andante religioso [24]
5.1a Feuillet d’album No. 2, introduction [92]
5.1b Elegie, ‘Die Zelle in Nonnenwerth’, introduction [92]
5.2a Feuillet d’album No. 2, bars 26–30 [93]
5.2b Elegie, bars 31–53 [94]
5.3a Feuillet d’album, bars 64–7 [95]
5.3b Elegie, bars 101–13 [95]
5.4a Feuillet d’album No. 2, bar 108 to end [96]
5.4b Elegie, bar 128 to end [96]
5.5a Toccata, bars 1–20 [104]
5.5b Toccata, bars 65–94 [105]
5.6a Ungarischer Geschwindmarsch, bars 23–7 [108]
5.6b Ungarischer Geschwindmarsch, bar 114 to end [108]
5.7a Csárdás macabre, bars 49–57 [109]
5.7b Camille Saint-Saëns, Danse macabre, bars 655–65 [109]
5.8a Bagatelle ohne Tonart, bars 1–22 [117]
5.8b Bagatelle ohne Tonart, bars 57–85 [118]
8.1 Réminiscences de Lucia di Lammermoor (Henselt Edition), bars 1–16 [180]
10.1 Tasso, bars 1–7 [207]
10.2 Faust, movement 1, bars 1–5 [218]
Figures
5.1 Liszt, Csárdás macabre, Form (harmonic functions expressed in terms
of D minor) [110]
7.1 Outline of Liszt’s Totentanz [164]
Tables
5.1 Franz Liszt, late music for solo piano (1869–86) [100]
7.1 Chronology of Liszt’s piano concerti and related works for piano and
orchestra [155]
10.1 Prometheus: Musical analysis and relationships between the symphonic poem
[vi] and the choruses [211]
Notes on contributors
James M. Baker is Professor of Music at Brown University. His current research inter-
ests include analysis and performance, chromaticism in tonal music, and tonal
implication in twentieth-century music.
Anna Celenza, an Associate Professor of Musicology at Michigan State University,
published her first book, The Early Works of Niels W. Gade: In Search of the Poetic,
in 2001. Since then she has published several articles on Liszt, the most recent
appearing in 19th-Century Music, and completed the manuscript for a second
book entitled Hans Christian Andersen and Music: The Nightingale Revealed.
James Deaville is Associate Professor in the School of the Arts at McMaster Uni-
versity, Canada. He has published articles about Liszt in The Liszt Companion
(Greenwood Press) and the Journal of Musicological Research, Canadian Univer-
sity Music Review and Notes, entries about Liszt’s New-German colleagues in The
New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, revised edition and Die Musik in
Geschichte und Gegenwart, revised edition, and has co-edited (with Michael Saffle)
Analecta Lisztiana II: New Light on Liszt and His Music.
Katharine Ellis is Reader in Music at Royal Holloway, University of London. She
has published widely on aspects of musical culture in nineteenth-century France,
including its music criticism, its performance traditions and questions of reper-
tory and canon. She is currently finishing a monograph on the early music revival
in nineteenth-century France. Recent and forthcoming articles focus on the Palest-
rina revival, issues in music education, and Berlioz’s critical rhetorics. Katharine
Ellis is a former editor of Music & Letters and now edits the Journal of the Royal
Musical Association.
Kenneth Hamilton is a concert pianist and Senior Lecturer in Music at Birmingham
University. His previous publications include Liszt: Sonata in B Minor (Cambridge
University Press), and he has particular research and performance interests in
nineteenth-century piano music and performance practice.
Monika Hennemann has been a member of the Musicology Faculty at Florida State
University, the German Faculty at the University of Rhode Island, and most
recently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Musicology at the College Conservatory
of Music, University of Cincinnati. She has written extensively on Mendelssohn
and also published articles on Webern and on nineteenth-century reception his-
tory.
Dolores Pesce is Professor of Music at Washington University in St Louis. Her writings
on Liszt have appeared in 19th-Century Music and in Nineteenth-Century Piano
Music, ed. R. Larry Todd (Schirmer, 1990).
Alexander Rehding is Assistant Professor of Music at Harvard University. He is the
author of Hugo Riemann and the Birth of Modern Musical Thought (2003) and
co-editor of Music Theory and Natural Order from the Renaissance to the Early
[vii]
viii Notes on contributors
Twentieth Century (2001). He is currently working on a study of monumentality

in nineteenth-century music.
Reeves Shulstad is the Director of the School of Music and Assistant Professor at
Salem College in Winston-Salem, NC. Her doctoral dissertation, ‘The Symbol
of Genius: Franz Liszt’s Symphonic Poems and Symphonies’, an interdisciplinary
study of a selection of Liszt’s orchestral works within the context of the nineteenth-
century definition of genius, will be published by Scarecrow Press, and she has
presented numerous papers on topics concerning the relationship between music,
philosophy and literature.
Preface
The Cambridge Companion to Liszt presents a survey and contextualisation

of his music by some of the leading writers in the field. Few composers
have benefited more than Liszt from the upsurge in interest in Romanticism
over the last few decades, and the centenary of his death in 1986 gave extra
impetus to re-evaluation of his importance. A volume such as this is very
different from one that could have been written even twenty years ago. In the
first place, a greater quantity of Liszt’s music is now in print. The New Liszt
Edition (Editio Musica, Budapest) is gradually progressing through what
must be one of the most dauntingly large work-lists of any composer, and
many formerly overlooked or unpublished pieces are now easily available for
study. In the second place, and at least as importantly, much more of Liszt’s
music is actually being played and heard. If a central core of his achieve-
ment – mostly some piano pieces and a handful of symphonic poems –
has always been in the standard repertoire, the rest has until recently
remained on the periphery. Although it is still true that several masterpieces –
the Gran Mass and Psalm XIII come immediately to mind – deserve much
more frequent performance, artists are now including pieces on concert
programmes or recordings that have hardly been heard since their creation.
One pioneering project that must be mentioned specifically in this context is
Leslie Howard’s astonishing achievement in committing all of Liszt’s piano
music to disc (on the Hyperion label), including all significantly different
versions and all available extant unpublished works. Owing to the success
of this monumental undertaking, even the most obscure transcriptions or
historically important ‘first attempts’, like the early versions of the Dante
Sonata, need no longer be only references on a page, but can be experienced
directly by any interested music-lover, however shaky or non-existent their
piano technique. Gradually more of Liszt’s output in other genres is also
being recorded, and this will no doubt prompt further re-evaluation of his
legacy. After all, even Wagner declared that he found it virtually impossible
to judge Liszt’s symphonic poems from the printed page – he needed to hear
them played.
Many late twentieth-century landmarks in Liszt scholarship have also
made this Companion more timely, accurate and easier to write. Fair mention
of all of these would take up several pages, and would certainly include
work by Mária Eckhardt and Detlef Altenburg, but only a few more general
[ix] items can be cited by name here. Alan Walker’s magisterial three-volume
x Preface
study of Liszt’s life and work (New York: Knopf, 1983–96) has unearthed
much new material and provided a strong stimulus for further research. His
other publications, including the recent The Death of Franz Liszt (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2002), an edition of the diary of Liszt’s pupil Lina
Schmalhausen, who helped to nurse the composer through his final illness,
are also thought-provoking reading for Liszt specialists and enthusiasts.
Michael Saffle’s essential Franz Liszt – A Guide to Research (New York:
Garland, 1991, revised edition, 2004) is no doubt on every Liszt scholar’s
writing-desk, as should be Adrian Williams’s splendid Portrait of Liszt by
Himself and His Contemporaries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), which
gathers together a vast number of judiciously chosen and important primary
sources, presented chronologically with extensive annotations. Williams’s
other collection Franz Liszt: Selected Letters (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998)
is scarcely less useful. Finally, Derek Watson’s perceptive and concise Liszt
(London: Dent, 1989) shows that it is possible to condense a vast subject
into a single volume without jeopardising either accuracy or an elegant prose
style.
The first three chapters of this Companion help to place Liszt in the con-
text of his own time and of twentieth-century reception history. A chronol-
ogy gives a brief run-through of the most important events of his life, but
with so much fine biographical writing on the composer already existing
(some of it mentioned above) there seems little need for another straight-
forward re-telling of a well-known saga. The chapters that follow survey
the major genres of Liszt’s music, and attempt to balance range of refer-
ence with depth of discussion, always a problem with a composer like Liszt,
who simply wrote so much. To the sacrificial altar have gone some of the
organ music (although the most important pieces are touched upon in my
chapter ‘Piano Music: Early and Weimar Periods’), the small amount of
chamber music (much of which consists of arrangements of piano pieces,
and the rest of which is simply not very good) and the few melodramas.
Liszt’s own writings are left to speak for themselves in the quotations that
abound throughout this volume. As will be obvious, all the contributors to
the Companion discuss their allotted areas in their own style and in their
own way. I see it as no part of an editor’s duty to impose uniformity on a
subject teeming with such richness and variety.
Acknowledgements
To save Penny Souster having to read any more of this book, the first sen-
tence is entirely devoted to singing the praises of her legendary patience as
a commissioning editor, and to wishing her a long and happy retirement.
I should also like to thank the copy-editor, Sue Dickinson, whose deft eye
for detail has considerably improved both the layout and the readability
of this volume. Music examples have been taken from: New Liszt Edition,
Edito Musica Budapest, reproduced with kind permission of the publisher.
Copyright permission to reproduce the Plates is gratefully acknowledged as
follows: Plate 1.1, Josef Danhauser, Liszt am Flügel (1840), Staatliche Museen
zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Nationalgalerie/F. V. 42, photo: Jürgen
Liepe; Plate 7.1 Hans Holbein, The Equality of Death, woodcut from
Todtentanz, Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Plate 7.2, Orcagna,
Trionfo della Morte, fresco, Museo dell’ Opera del Duomo, Pisa; Plate 7.3, first
page of Liszt’s 1849 version of Totentanz, Piermont Morgan Library,
Lehman Collection, New York.
[xi]
Chronology
1811 – Liszt born on 22 October in Raiding, in a largely German-speaking part of

Hungary. His father, Adam Liszt, is a superintendent of sheep on the
Esterhazy estates, his mother, Maria Anna Lager, is a former chambermaid.
1818 – Begins piano lessons with his father, and soon shows signs of prodigious
musical talents.
1819 – Visits Vienna with his father and plays to Czerny, who agrees to accept him as
a pupil.
1820 – First concerts in Oedenburg and Pressburg. After the latter a group of
Hungarian noblemen offer an allowance to enable him to move to Vienna for
lessons with Czerny.
1821 – Move to Vienna delayed as his father seeks permission for leave of absence
from the Esterhazy estates.
1822 – The family arrive in Vienna, where Liszt takes composition lessons from
Salieri, in addition to his piano studies with Czerny. His first published
composition: a variation on a waltz by Diabelli.
1823 – Liszt meets Beethoven. Concerts in Vienna, Pest and several German towns.
The family travel to Paris hoping to enrol Liszt in the Conservatoire there,
but he is refused admission on the grounds that he is a foreigner.
1824 – Studies composition privately with Paer, and makes a successful Paris debut.
Begins his association with the Erard family, who organise a tour of England
for him, and their pianos.
1825 – Tours England for a second time, and gives concerts in southern France. The
opera Don Sanche – written in collaboration with Paer – is premiered in Paris.
1826 – Tours France and Switzerland. Composition lessons with Reicha. Etude en
douze exercises published.
1827 – Death of Liszt’s father.
1828 – First love, with his piano-pupil Caroline de Saint-Cricq. After the
relationship is forcibly ended by her father, Liszt becomes depressed. He
abandons public performance, and immerses himself in Romantic literature
and the Catholic religion.
1829 – Teaches and reads voraciously. Nurtures thoughts of entering priesthood.
1830 – The revolution in Paris shakes Liszt out of his melancholy. Meets Berlioz,
Lamartine, Hugo and Heine.
1831 – Liszt hears Paganini, and is astonished by his mastery of the violin. This spurs
him to obsessive study of the technique of his own instrument.
1832 – Friendship with Chopin, whose Paris debut is made this year.
1833 – Begins relationship with Marie d’Agoult. Transcribes Berlioz’s Symphonie
Fantastique for the piano.
[xii]
xiii Chronology
1834 – Composes Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, three Apparitions and an essay

‘On the Future of Church Music’.
1835 – Elopes with Marie d’Agoult to Switzerland, where he takes up a position
teaching piano at the Geneva Conservatoire. Their first child, Blandine, is
born in December. Writes essay ‘On the Position of Artists’.
1836 – Composes several opera fantasias. Returns twice to Paris, where rivalry
develops with Thalberg.
1837 – Several Paris concerts, including famous ‘duel’ with Thalberg in the salon of
Princess Christina Belgiojoso. Composes 12 Grandes Etudes. Travels with
Marie d’Agoult to Italy, where their second child Cosima is born.
1838 – Concerts in Vienna, partly in aid of Pest flood victims. Arranges Etudes
d’après Paganini.
1839 – Gives first ‘musical soliloquy’ – a concert entirely without supporting
artists – in Rome. Son Daniel born. Beginning of regular tours as a virtuoso.
Slow decline of the relationship with d’Agoult.
1840 – Presented with Hungarian sword of honour in Pest, where he also makes his
debut as a conductor. First meetings with Schumann and Wagner. Tours of
Germany and England.
1841 – Feverish round of concerts, both in Britain and continental Europe.
Composes fantasies on, among other operas, Don Giovanni, Norma and
Robert le Diable.
1842 – Visits Russia. Given post of honorary Kapellmeister in Weimar, a position
that allows him to continue his concert tours.
1843 – Debut in Breslau as an opera conductor. First songs published.
1844 – Final separation from Marie d’Agoult.
1845 – Conducts his First Beethoven Cantata at the unveiling of the Beethoven
Monument in Bonn.
1846 – Tours of France, Germany and Eastern Europe. Increasing disillusionment
with his virtuoso career.
1847 – Meets Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, and sojourns at her
Woronince estate. Soon after his trip to Constantinople, where he plays
before the Sultan, Liszt abandons his concert tours to concentrate on
composition. He thereafter refuses all offers of fees for public performances.
1848 – Settles in Weimar, where he is soon joined by Carolyne. Devotes most of his
time to duties as Kapellmeister, and begins to work on what will later become
his series of Symphonic Poems.
1849 – Conducts Tannhäuser, and gives brief shelter to Wagner, who is fleeing
Germany after the failure of the Dresden uprising. Completes Italian volume
of Années de Pèlerinage, and makes sketches for an opera, Sardanapale.
1850 – Composes the Fantasia and Fugue for Organ on ‘Ad nos, ad salutarem
undam’, and conducts premiere of Lohengrin.
1851 – Completes several orchestral works, including Mazeppa, and makes final
versions of his two sets of piano studies. Book on Chopin, and some articles,
all ghost-written by Carolyne.
1852 – Conducts premiere of revised version of Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini.
xiv Chronology
1853 – Sonata in B Minor, Ballade in B Minor and Festklänge completed. Brahms

visits Weimar.
1854 – Finishes initial version of Faust Symphony.
1855 – Gran Mass and Psalm XIII completed. First performance of Piano Concerto
in E, conducted by Berlioz with Liszt as soloist.
1856 – Completes Dante Symphony. Premieres of the Gran Mass and Hungaria.
1857 – Premieres of Piano Concerto in A Minor, Ce qu’on entend sur la montagne
(final version), Sonata in B Minor, Faust Symphony, Die Ideale, Dante
Symphony, Héroı̈de funèbre and Hunnenschlacht.
1858 – Hamlet completed. Following vociferous opposition to the performance of
Cornelius’s Barber of Baghdad in Weimar, Liszt resigns from his post as
Kapellmeister.
1859 – Writes, in collaboration with Carolyne, the book The Gypsies and their Music
in Hungary. Liszt’s son Daniel dies at the age of 20.
1860 – Carolyne leaves Weimar for Rome, where she will remain for the rest of her
life. Two Episodes from Lenau’s Faust composed. Liszt’s first grandchild
Daniela von Bülow born.
1861 – First Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein festival in Weimar. Liszt’s planned
marriage to Carolyne in Rome thwarted at the last minute by opposition
from the Vatican.
1862 – Oratorio St Elisabeth finished. Liszt’s daughter Blandine dies after
complications following the birth of her son, Daniel.
1863 – During Liszt’s stay at the monastery of the Madonna del Rosario, a visit from
the Pope prompts him to think once more about a role in the Catholic church.
1864 – Sojourn at the Villa d’Este in Tivoli, which he will subsequently visit
repeatedly. Trip to Paris, where he sees his mother for what will be the last
time.
1865 – Premieres of Totentanz, St Elisabeth and Deux Légendes. Liszt takes minor
orders in the Catholic church.
1866 – Death of Liszt’s mother. Last meeting with Marie d’Agoult.
1867 – Premiere of Hungarian Coronation Mass. Completion of oratorio Christus.
1868 – Cosima now openly leaves her husband Hans von Bülow to live with Wagner,
causing a breach in relations with Liszt.
1869 – Begins his ‘vie trifurquée’ where he spends parts of the year respectively in
Weimar, Rome and Budapest.
1870 – Cosima marries Wagner.
1871 – Estrangement from Wagner and Cosima continues. Scandal involving Liszt
and his pupil Olga Janina.
1872 – Rapprochement with the Wagners. Liszt visits Bayreuth.
1873 – Premiere of Christus.
1874 – Completes The Bells of Strassburg Cathedral, and begins the oratorio
St Stanislaus.
1875 – Liszt made president of the Budapest Academy of Music.
1876 – Premiere of Hamlet. Liszt present at first Bayreuth festival.
xv Chronology
1877 – Completes the third book of Années de pèlerinage. Plays Beethoven’s Emperor
Concerto and Choral Fantasia at a concert in Vienna marking the fiftieth
anniversary of Beethoven’s death – the young Busoni is among the audience.
1878 – Composes Via Crucis.
1879 – Ossa arida composed, and several transcriptions.
1880 – Attends various concerts of his music. Continues work fitfully on
St Stanislaus.
1881 – Premiere of Second Mephisto Waltz. A fall down stairs in Weimar precipitates
the decline of Liszt’s health.
1882 – Composes final symphonic poem – From the Cradle to the Grave. Attends
premiere of Parsifal in Bayreuth.
1883 – Death of Wagner sends Liszt into increasing despondency.
1884 – Premiere of Salve Polonia. Attends Parsifal performances in Bayreuth.
1885 – Debussy visits Liszt in Rome. Various piano pieces composed, including
completion of Hungarian Historical Portraits.
1886 – Liszt received with great enthusiasm on visit to England. Gives last concert in
Luxembourg before travelling to Bayreuth, where he hears Tristan and
Parsifal. Dies at Bayreuth on 31 July.
1 Liszt: the Romantic artist
kat h a r i n e e l l i s
It is one of the ironies of French history that the revolution which brought
with it the bourgeois king, Louis-Philippe, and a ‘middle-of-the-road’ offi-
cial attitude to both culture and government policy should also have marked
the beginning of the headiest decade of French Romanticism: the 1830s.
Extremism and compromise coexisted in the form of several philosophies –
artistic, religious and social – competing for attention. Added to which,
the nature of Romanticism itself as a self-conscious movement defined as
much by internal contradiction as anything else meant that living in Paris
during the 1830s offered unparalleled intellectual and artistic stimulation.1
For a young man of Liszt’s intellectual curiosity such bounties were not to
be scorned. The city was effectively his university.2
Salon culture was buoyant, populated by the major figures of French
Romanticism: Delacroix, Sand, Vigny, Hugo, Musset, Lamartine, Berlioz,
Chopin, Heine and Balzac. To this constellation of friends and acquain-
tances, Liszt could add his connections with Maurice Schlesinger’s Revue et
Gazette musicale (a mouthpiece for German Romantic ideas in France), his
enthusiasm for the Saint-Simonians and for the Liberal Catholic philoso-
phies of the Abbé Robert Félicité Lamennais and the writer and social
philosopher Pierre-Simon Ballanche. Voracious reading extended from the
Bible and the writings of St Augustine and Thomas à Kempis to Goethe,
Byron, Montaigne, Voltaire, Hugo, Chateaubriand and the work of his-
torians such as Michelet and Quinet. Liszt’s experiences of the 1830s
largely defined both his outlook and his behaviour, and, consequently,
the manner in which he was perceived as an artist. His openness to dif-
ferent ways of thinking – not all of them compatible – caused Heine to
remark: ‘Heaven only knows in what philosophical stable he will find his
next hobbyhorse.’3 Yet even the usually acerbic Heine tempered his com-
ment by acknowledging the breadth of Liszt’s humanism and his ‘inde-
fatigable thirst for enlightenment and divinity’.4 That quest had its roots
in Liszt’s religious soul-searching following his father’s death in 1827, and
the depression occasioned by his first major romantic disappointment –
the abrupt and class-driven termination of his relationship with Caroline
de Saint-Cricq by her father, Count Pierre de Saint-Cricq, in 1828. Such
experiences – sometimes dismissed simply as a case of mal de René 5 – were
[1]
2 Katharine Ellis
nevertheless the bedrock on which a lifelong spirituality and sense of social

justice were formed.
Liszt’s identification with the Romantic movement was intimately linked
with his aspiration to be accepted as an artist rather than as a mere virtuoso.
Acutely aware of new fracture lines within artistic criticism which led to
the denigration of instrumental technique as an end rather than a means,
he had to negotiate a fine line between maintaining public popularity (and
thus ensuring material success) and securing the respect of those elite artists
whom he admired. In the wake of Schlesinger’s excoriating attacks on the
operatic fantasies and concertos of Heinrich Herz in the Revue et Gazette
musicale of 1834–6, mirrored in Schumann’s Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, he
suffered the ‘guilty conscience’ of a man whose overwhelming technical skill
became a burden because it was too easily allied to ignoble music demanded
by an undiscriminating public. In addition, he found himself trapped in the
middle of a debate, sparked by enthusiasm for the notion of what we would
now call musical canonicity and the Romantic cult of genius, about the
ownership of great musical ‘works’ (increasingly defined as their texts), and
the extent of interpreters’ freedom to adapt them for their own purposes.6
Terminology was important: as the concept of the Romantic virtuoso slid
further into self-contradiction (predicated as it was on an uneasy relation-
ship between poetry and effect, between artist and entertainer), so Liszt
aspired to be a Romantic artist. This chapter, then, concentrates on the
elements of that journey as they appear in Liszt’s life (and representations
thereof) before his move to Weimar, with a brief coda on his continuing
fidelity, even after the disillusion of failed liberal revolutions in 1848/9, to
Romantic ideals of the artist’s duty to society.
The artist as alienated wanderer

The brand of musical Romanticism with which Liszt had closest contact dur-
ing the 1830s was that expounded in the Revue et Gazette musicale, a specialist
weekly journal to which he contributed articles during his years of travel,
from 1835 to 1841. Maurice Schlesinger’s journal, which included Berlioz,
Wagner, Sand, Dumas and Balzac among its contributors, was intended to
provide a beacon of Romantic idealism in a world tarnished by materialist
concerns and the politics of compromise (though its ultimate rationale was,
of course, advertisement). From the outset its contents were imbued with the
spirit of E. T. A. Hoffmann, whose eccentric and undervalued kapellmeister
Johannes Kreisler7 formed the prototype for several portrayals of instru-
mentalists and composers in short stories which Schlesinger commissioned.
The theme of misunderstood genius as the precariously close neighbour of
3 The Romantic artist
insanity was almost ubiquitous. Balzac developed it in his short story Gam-
bara of 1837, in which the composer of the title explained his predicament as
a victim of his own superiority: ‘My misfortune comes from having heard the
concerts of angels and having believed that men could understand them.’8
His words found a counterpart in Liszt’s open letter (published in the Revue
et Gazette) from Lake Como, written in September of that year:
How wretched, how truly wretched we artists are! We experience

momentary flashes when we seem to have an intuitive grasp of the divine,
when we can sense its presence within us, like a mystical insight, a
supernatural understanding of the harmony of the universe; but as soon as
we want to flesh out our sensations, to capture these evanescent flights of
the soul, the vision vanishes, the god disappears, and a man is left alone
with a lifeless work, one that the crowd’s gaze will quickly strip of any last
illusions it held for him.9
The previous January, Liszt had written in similar terms to George Sand, the
‘poet-voyager’, calling artists ‘men who have no brothers among men, . . .
children of God, . . . exiles from heaven who suffer and sing and whom the
world calls “poets” ’.10 A second Lettre d’un bachelier to Sand, dated 30 April
1837, linked the idea of alienation from the world with that of the Wanderer,
an image of themselves which both Liszt and Marie d’Agoult cultivated in
their writings and travels: ‘It behooves an artist more than anyone else to
pitch a tent only for an hour and not to build anything like a permanent
residence. Isn’t he always a stranger among men? Whatever he does, wherever
he goes, he always feels himself an exile.’11 In September of the same year
Liszt reiterated the point by quoting lines from Goethe’s Letters from Italy,
providing a self-portrait of a man ‘exiled by his own decision, wandering
on purpose, knowingly imprudent, everywhere a stranger and everywhere
at home’.12 In Italy and Switzerland the couple acted out a personal drama
in the spirit of a Caspar David Friedrich painting, retaining the isolation
of anonymity, avoiding the crowd and seeking meaning in the mystery and
grandeur of the natural world.
That journey helped fix many aspects of Liszt’s Romantic persona,
detectable in the series of Lettres d’un bachelier which were themselves
inspired by George Sand’s series of Lettres d’un voyageur. The very act of
preparing essays for publication further encouraged Liszt’s propensity to
reflection on matters artistic, cultural and spiritual. Moreover, whether or
not we view the final texts of these letters as the work of d’Agoult, rather
than Liszt, the enterprise was itself a manifestation of the metaphysical
fusion of the arts which the Romantics prized so highly. Travels to Italy had
a similar effect on Liszt as they did on Berlioz, inducing depression at the
decadence of the contemporary operatic school and the lack of ‘serious’
4 Katharine Ellis
instrumental music, and thereby intensifying his allegiance to German

music and German modes of thought. Equally, though, Liszt’s travels in
Italy heightened his awareness of the country’s rich cultural heritage, espe-
cially in the graphic arts, which he now viewed in Romantic vein as more
important for the underlying principles they shared with music than for the
technical differences that separated them from it:
Day by day my feelings and thoughts gave me a better insight into the hidden
relationship that unites all works of genius. Raphael and Michelangelo
increased my understanding of Mozart and Beethoven; Giovanni Pisano,
Fra Beato, and Il Francia explained Allegri, Marcello, and Palestrina to me.
Titian and Rossini appeared to me like twin stars shining with the same
light. The Colosseum and the Campo Santo are not as foreign as one thinks
to the Eroica Symphony and the Requiem [Mozart’s]. Dante has found his
pictorial expression in Orcagna and Michelangelo, and someday perhaps he
will find his musical expression in the Beethoven of the future.13
It was in this same spirit that French critics wrote appreciatively of Liszt’s
playing: the fact that he so obviously understood the greatness of Shake-
speare, Goethe, Schiller, Byron, Hugo and Hoffmann set him apart from
other, unidimensional and therefore less Romantic, musicians. He was
becoming that which he aspired to be: a ‘poet’.14 In this celebrated passage
from the Lettre to Berlioz, he displayed a second Romantic tendency: rev-
erence for a distant, idealised, past which collapses into the present just as
different art forms collapse into one another.
Liszt and Hoffmann: the divided self

For all his idealisation of painting, though, it was literature that inspired
Liszt most. His request to stop at Newstead Abbey, Byron’s ancestral home,
while on a British tour in 1840 is unsurprising when we read his letters
of the period, in which he stresses his feelings of affinity with the poet.15
But the importance of his literary enthusiasms of the 1830s and 40s to
his musical personality seems to have been all but invisible to onlookers
seduced by surface impressions, not least a public demeanour and mode of
behaviour which encouraged interpretations of Liszt’s own life as novelistic.
Comparisons with Hoffmann’s Kreisler became inevitable; the only wonder
is that they did not appear earlier.
It was entirely fitting that Liszt’s debut as a literary creation should have
been in a conte fantastique in which he was evoked variously as Hoffmann’s
son, as Kreisler’s brother, and as a ‘tale’ of Hoffmann.16 Théophile de
Ferrière’s Brand-Sachs was published in the Revue et Gazette in April and
May 1836. The story centres around the idea of the Doppelgänger. Hoffmann
and a learned friend decide to create twin images: Hoffmann creates Kreisler;
his friend has a son whom he brings up as a Romantic artist steeped in the
reading of Hoffmann’s tales – the pianist-composer Wilhelm Brand-Sachs.
In a clear reference to the death of Adam Liszt, Hoffmann’s friend dies
when Brand-Sachs is aged 16, in Paris, and already the ‘finest pianist in
the world’.17 Introduced as a figment of their imaginations, this phantom –
‘blond, thin, agile, [who] uttered other-worldly things about music’ – comes
to embody Romanticism itself.18 De Ferrière portrays Brand-Sachs as an
‘extravagant’ character – ‘one of those men whose intellect and feeling have
acquired immense proportions, to the detriment of common sense’.19 In
a move which implicitly links this Lisztian character with Berlioz, Brand-
Sachs is a fervent admirer of Beethoven, Weber and Gluck: at the mention of
Beethoven while playing to friends, ‘his face took on a sublime expression,
his eyes shot darts of lightning, and his inspired forehead seemed encircled
with a halo’.20 However, where Hoffmann’s portrayal of Kreisler suggested
an element of poetic madness, de Ferrière’s of Brand-Sachs/Liszt treated
him as an incurable case: the story ends with a graphic scene in which the
hero raves incoherently on his deathbed.21 A few years later, Liszt came
to recognise some of the weaknesses of Romanticism which de Ferrière’s
story lampooned as comprising an unhealthy concentration on the morbid,
the sickly and the hyper-sensitive, combined with an extravagant degree of
self-belief:
You know this sickness of our time; it disturbs even the finest minds and
damages even the best natures. It is a kind of solemn, moral vanity, a
religion of the self that fills the hearts of these poor children with a host of
silly and foolish desires. They intoxicate themselves with these notions,
sometimes even to the point of death when the realization of their own
uselessness, which they disguise as the injustice of fate, succeeds in
becoming the mistress of their misguided imagination.22
Alongside clear references to Liszt’s early touring career and his Parisian
lifestyle, it is the contradictions and ambiguities in Brand-Sachs’s personal-
ity which mark him out as the pianist’s literary counterpart. As Jacqueline
Bellas notes, ‘The characteristic of Brand-Sachs is to find definition only in
ambiguity. He is never exactly what he appears to be.’23 And Liszt did indeed
contain within himself all the contradictory extremes that helped defy conve-
nient categorisation: the artist who immersed himself in Beethoven’s piano
music in the company of friends was also the showman determined not
to be outdone by a pianistic rival such as Sigismund Thalberg; the man
who prized religious devotion and attached himself to the Abbé Lamen-
nais was at the same time engaging in a spectacular adulterous relationship
in which he was also openly unfaithful; the Hungarian nationalist who set
6 Katharine Ellis
such store by the jewelled sword of honour presented to him in Pest in 1840
was a non-Hungarian-speaking cosmopolitan who shared most of his life
between Paris and Weimar; the anonymous and unrecognised Wanderer of
the late 1830s was also the most fêted of all travelling virtuosi. That Liszt
recognised his divided self is not in doubt. In a lighter (and unusually ironic)
moment he was able to refer to the problem as that of ‘very cleverly steering
a course between the Ideal and the Real’.24 It was not a juste milieu in respect
of which he was conspicuously successful; he remained a man of extremes.
As Eva Hanska wrote in her journal in 1843: ‘He is an extraordinary mix-
ture . . . There are sublime things in him, but also deplorable ones; he is the
human reflection of what is grandiose in nature – but also, alas, of what is
abhorrent. There are sublime heights, the mountains with dazzling peaks,
but also bottomless gulfs and abysses.’25
The rhetoric of the sublime

Like so many other writers, Hanska used the imagery of the Romantic sub-
lime to describe Liszt, just as Liszt and d’Agoult found ways of writing it
into their musico-literary travelogues, including the Années de Pèlerinage
and their joint journal. Germanic writers brought up on Kant and Schlegel,
and through Kant’s discussion of his writings, Edmund Burke, found such
references unavoidable, thereby creating a critical rhetoric in which Liszt was
defined as an awesome and irresistible power. Burke’s discussions of the sub-
lime and its effects in his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas
of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) were of long-lasting influence, and
are of central importance to our understanding not only of Liszt’s reception
as a performer, but also of Romantic criticism in general. Ironically, only the
British, during his tours of the 1840s, seemed largely impervious to a tradi-
tion of associating Liszt’s pianism with this intellectual and artistic concept.
The English critic Henry Chorley’s comment that Liszt was incomprehen-
sible except in the context of ‘newer schools of European imagination’26
reveals much about his sense of distance from a movement in which his
own countrymen had nevertheless played an inaugural part. Burke’s def-
inition centred on the distinction between the sublime as evidenced by
feelings of pain, terror and awe in the face of the rugged, vast and elemental,
as opposed to the pleasurable serenity of appreciation which characterised
perception of the beautiful – all grace and polish but also diminutive weak-
ness. Perception, in both Burke and Schlegel, was paramount: the sublime
was perceived in external phenomena but then internalised as an emotional
experience which in turn craved expression in the form of ‘enthusiasm’
(Schlegel’s word, later taken up by Berlioz, as we shall see).27 In addition,
in a move which Hoffmann was to emulate in his famous comparison of

Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven of 1810, Burke characterised the beautiful
as light, the sublime as dark and gloomy.28
The phenomenon is best revealed in three famous accounts (two closely
related versions by Berlioz, one by the playwright Ernest Legouvé) of Liszt’s
impromptu playing of the opening Adagio of the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata in the
darkness of Legouvé’s salon in 1837. In these accounts the opposition of
dark and light, and the elements of pathos, emotion of religious intensity,
and physical paralysis induced by the artistic experience, parallel Burke’s
definition of sublimity to an uncanny degree.29 Berlioz and Legouvé disagree
as to whether Liszt was involved in having the lights turned down and
putting out the dying fire, thereby plunging the already dark room into
near-blackness; in other respects, the accounts are similar. As Legouvé told
it:
There were no lights, and the fire in the grate had burned very low.
Goubaux brought the lamp from my study, while Liszt went to the piano
and the rest of us sought seats. ‘Turn up the wick’, I told Goubaux: ‘we can’t
see clearly enough’. But instead, he turned it down, plunging us into
blackness, or, rather, into full shadow; and this sudden transition from light
to dark, coming together with the first notes of the piano, had a moving
effect on every one of us . . . [We] remained rooted to the spot where we
happened to be, no one attempting to move . . . I had dropped into an
armchair, and above my head heard stifled sobs and moans. It was Berlioz.
According to Berlioz, who was writing much closer to the event, it was he
himself who prevented the lamps being brightened, and Liszt who insisted
that they be extinguished, along with the fire. And while such a gesture has its
own flamboyance, it is equally plausibly related to the ideas of the interpreter
disappearing anonymously behind the greatness of the composer’s artwork
(Berlioz assures us that Liszt added no extra notes, as had been his wont –
indeed, this purification of his playing is the rationale for the anecdote), and
of the new value of music as an abstract, disembodied art free not only from
fixed semantics but also, in idealised form, from the distractions of visible
performers and machines.30
Liszt’s associations with the Romantic sublime took two primary forms in
Liszt reception: the presentation of the pianist as its embodiment, evidenced
by his facial expressions, gestures at the piano and a musical interpretation
of overwhelming expressive power; and descriptions of a sublime effect of
‘enthusiasm’ on the listener or writer, in the manner of the paralysis which
Legouvé depicted and which Berlioz described graphically as an uncontrol-
lable tensing of the nerves leading to a half-faint. And while Berlioz’s story
Le suicide par enthousiasme (1834) has his hero ‘nearly fainting with emotion’
8 Katharine Ellis
during La vestale and finally committing suicide because he has experienced

the ultimate,31 there are no accounts of Berlioz the conductor falling vic-
tim to his own sublimity in the manner of Liszt’s onstage fainting fit at a
Paris concert of April 1835, when he had to be carried from the platform,
thereby bringing a concert involving over seventy musicians to a premature
end. Presentations of Liszt as the embodiment of the sublime frequently
emphasised a demonic character combined with an ecstatic religiosity, pro-
viding another set of defining contradictions. In his A Poet’s Bazaar, Hans
Christian Andersen described Liszt’s countenance as moving from demonic
possession to angelic nobility within a single piece; Schumann, writing for
his Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in 1840, compared his demonic power with
Paganini after a concert in Dresden in which he had held his public in
thrall; for Théophile Gautier, writing in 1844, Liszt’s demonic aspect was
Hoffmannesque;32 for Heine, the pianist appeared ‘possessed, tempestuous,
volcanic, and as fiery as a titan’.33
In the reports of those who described their own reactions to Liszt’s
playing, we glimpse another side of the demonic: the ability to control the
listener by inducing psychological and physiological symptoms of suffering
mixed with pleasure – the agony of ecstasy portrayed in Berlioz’s reaction to
the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata. Caroline Boissier’s response of January 1832 (before
she became scandalised at Liszt’s lifestyle in Geneva) also fits the paradigm:
‘When listening to Liszt, I feel what no other artist has made me feel; it is
not only admiration, it is ecstasy and fatigue together, which at one and the
same time consume and enchant me.’34 She, too, called Liszt ‘sublime . . . a
musical demon’.35 That competitive element of control, the polar opposite
of the sublime faint, is most strikingly characterised in a diary entry of
9 August 1836, in which Albertine de la Rive-Necker linked Liszt’s playing
to the eruption of a sudden storm, the ferocity of which he proceeded to
challenge via the family piano:
No one notices that the storm has grown more violent; the sounds that he
draws from the piano muffle those of the thunder, and, frail though they
look, his fingers possess a strength capable of stifling the noise of the
tempest. He ‘plays a storm’. On hearing a roll of thunder, he murmurs to
Albertine: ‘I shall hold my own.’ And indeed he confounds and enraptures
us, putting us into a state of ecstasy such as we have never known before.
‘I win, I am the master’, he seems to say.36
Whether or not the storm occurred as de la Rive-Necker described it, the

ploy of placing Liszt in competitive alliance with the tempestuous and ele-
mental was common. One of the most famous images of the pianist, Josef
Danhauser’s Liszt am Flügel (1840), features him playing to a collection of
rapt artist-listeners, in a room (supposedly his own) containing a portrait of
Plate 1.1 Josef Danhauser, Liszt am Flügel (1840), oil. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz,
Nationalgalerie/F.V. 42. Photo: Jürgen Liepe
Byron but dominated by a bust of Beethoven (in whose general direction he

gazes upwards, completing the dramatic diagonal that extends right across
the picture). Through a seemingly glassless window a distinctly stormy sun-
set is visible. But there is more. The grand piano itself appears to be half inside
the room and half outside, collapsing the distance between the here-and-
now and infinity; likewise, the outsize bust of Beethoven, which seems at first
sight to be placed on top of the piano, actually inhabits an ambiguous space
above it – a floating vision for the viewer, framed by, and existing beyond,
the window opening.37 If Beethoven exists in this painting at all, it is in the
mind’s eye. Hence, perhaps, the composer’s out-of-scale portrayal. More-
over, in the context of a twilight scene, the startling whiteness of his marble
form draws attention to the pool of light in which the right-hand side of the
canvas is bathed and which touches the faces of Liszt, Berlioz and Sand espe-
cially. The narrative description of Beethoven’s symphonies by Hoffmann
and Berlioz, especially those of the Fifth Symphony as a progression from
symbolic darkness to light, are close cousins of this picture. Danhauser’s
composition invites us to ‘read’ the image as an upward progression from
the predominantly dark browns, russets and reds of the left-hand side to
the tans, golds and creams on the right, where the piano and its cascades
10 Katharine Ellis
of sheet music lead us to Beethoven’s world of the infinite. In this fusion

of meticulous detail and visionary symbolism Danhauser encapsulated the
ideal of the Romantic sublime towards which Liszt strove, and placed him
at its epicentre.
Religiosity and social vision: the artist as priest

With very few exceptions, contemporary accounts of Liszt’s playing cast
him as a hero, demon, god or magician. However, Liszt’s own aspirations,
inspired by early exposure to Saint-Simonism and the teachings of Lamen-
nais, centred on the idea of the artist as priest: a regenerative force leading his
community away from decadence. Balzac lampooned what he considered
to be Liszt’s self-delusion in a notorious passage of his Béatrice: ‘He affects
to be an artist whose inspiration comes from on high. To hear him talk, art
is something holy, sacred . . . The artist, he declares, is a missionary; art is a
religion with its priests and must have its martyrs.’38
Such ideas were not only rooted in the French religious philosophies of
the 1830s, but were also implicit in Romantic writings, where the idea of the
sanctity of art brought with it a clear division between the initiated and
the philistine, resulting in a modernist elitism which characterised avant-
gardism well into the twentieth century.39 It was in France alone, however,
that it formed the basis of a socio-political movement. That such elitism
was pursued in music journals whose ostensible aim was to educate the
public was just one of the many paradoxes of Romanticism. Liszt, however,
subscribed to it in only diluted form, emphasising instead the democratising
and morally uplifting potential of music. In so doing he allied himself with
a diverse subculture within the French Romantic movement – that of the
Catholic and socialist reformers; he also joined the ranks of European artist-
reformers, Wagner included, whose socially engaged Romanticism in the
years before 1848 still predominated over a sense of art for art’s sake, which
was to be a driving force in artistic movements of the next half century, but
which Liszt studiously ignored.
Liszt’s first taste of such revolutionary social ideologies came through
the aesthetician Emile Barrault, who introduced him to a vision of Saint-
Simonism shared by Prosper Enfantin, one of the movement’s Pères
Suprêmes, in which the arts – with music at their apex – were to act
as humanity’s guiding light. Barrault and Enfantin’s musical preferences
accorded closely with those of Liszt in his idealist mode: they disdained the
trivialities of the modern Italian school, and with it the cult of virtuosity
in general, instead elevating the seriousness of German sacred and instru-
mental music from Handel onwards.40 Like Hoffmann, Barrault viewed
music as the most emotionally powerful of the arts because of its liber-
ating effect on the listener’s imagination. It was the only universal art: a
‘vague and mysterious language, which responds to all souls and receives
a special translation according to each person’s situation’.41 In addition to
such Romantic ideas concerning the nature and artistic supremacy of music
within Saint-Simonian doctrine, the allure of a movement in which the artist
immediately gained the nobility of leadership after generations of servitude
in aristocratic households proved irresistible to Liszt. In Aux artistes, Bar-
rault seemed to write a rallying cry, exhorting artists to stop behaving like
caged birds singing tunes their masters have taught them, and instead to
give their prophetic voices free rein. Only the artist, wrote Barrault, ‘through
the force of that sympathy which allows him to embrace both God and
society, is worthy of leading humanity’.42 Two later influences on Liszt –
Ballanche and Lamennais – also promulgated the heady idea of the artist as
priest.
Liszt’s concern for the masses or, more idealistically described, ‘the peo-
ple’, stemmed partly from the involvement of the lower classes in Saint-
Simonian doctrine – which led to particular emphasis on music-making in
which all followers could be actively involved – and the principles espoused
by Lamennais in his Paroles d’un croyant of 1834, in whose intoxicating mix
of egalitarian sentiment and evangelism, clothed in biblical rhetoric, Liszt
found an overwhelming work of revelation.43 The work’s dedication, ‘To
the People’, was significant. By the time of its publication, Liszt was already
convinced of the value of Lamennais’s revolutionary Liberal Catholicism
and admiring of his dedication to ideals of social regeneration; hence his
own dedication to Lamennais of the piano piece Lyon (1834) – a gesture
of solidarity with the city’s rioting silk weavers. In a Lettre d’un bachelier
of 1837 to Adolphe Pictet, Liszt lamented the traditional ties of musicians
to the aristocracy: ‘For too long they have been regarded as courtiers and
parasites of the palace. For too long they have celebrated the affairs of the
great and the pleasures of the rich. The time has come for them to restore
courage to the weak and to ease the suffering of the oppressed.’44 The first
official Lettre, written to George Sand, contained a utopian scene of artistic
dedication centring on Joseph Mainzer’s choral singing classes for working
men, part of a French orphéon tradition whose tenets Mainzer brought to
London and Edinburgh in 1841. Liszt’s interpretation of such music-making
was pure Lamennais:
He [Mainzer] imparts the benefits of music to these half-tutored,
uncultivated minds and introduces these men – fatally brutalized by the
coarse and only pleasures possible for them – to sweet and simple emotions
that elevate them without their being aware of it and return them by an
indirect but non-threatening path to the thoughts of a lost God.45
12 Katharine Ellis
It was undoubtedly with similar ideas in mind that Liszt wrote the sec-
tion on sacred music in his first piece of musical journalism, entitled ‘On
the Situation of Artists and on Their Condition in Society’ (1835). Here,
the populist message was rammed home with revolutionary fervour by a
man for whom the influence of Mennaisian religious thought had recently
become intertwined with Saint-Simonian ideas of social reconstruction. He
imagined a people’s music of religious patriotism ‘bursting from the fields,
the hamlets, the villages, the suburbs, the workshops, and the cities’. Ulti-
mately, he wrote, ‘all classes of people will be joined together in a common,
religious, grand and sublime feeling’.46 And although Saint-Simonian doc-
trine merely served to replace one kind of hierarchy with another, it was one
founded on social cohesion of a kind Liszt found sadly lacking in Parisian
high society. His attraction to the ‘principle of association’ espoused by
the Saint-Simonian movement formed a counterpoint to his own sense of
artistic isolation in the late 1830s, revealing him ultimately as a reluctant
Wanderer. Thoroughly disillusioned by the musical poverty of contempo-
rary Italy, he wrote another Lettre d’un bachelier to Maurice Schlesinger in
early 1839: ‘In music, as in everything else, associating with others is the
only principle that produces great results . . . One person is not really effec-
tive unless he can gather other individuals around him and communicate
his feelings and thoughts to them.’47 As Charles Suttoni points out, such
a vision accorded almost exactly with the character of the semi-monastic
Saint-Simonian community at Ménilmontant, just outside Paris.48
In some ways, Liszt practised what he preached. More populist than other
Romantics such as Berlioz, whose vision of the ‘people’ was limited strictly to
those who had already proved themselves worthy artistic souls,49 or Wagner,
whose Bayreuth Festival (supposedly intended for an open community of
pilgrims) served as a shrine to himself, Liszt championed the democratisa-
tion of music through piano reductions,50 viewed music criticism as nothing
less than ‘a widely available form of [music] education’,51 and, on realising
the decadence of Weimar’s cultural traditions in the early 1840s, set out – as
composer and conductor – to rebuild them for the benefit of its citizens.52
The Romantic afterburn

It seems to have occurred to few friends and onlookers of the 1830s and 1840s
that within Liszt there was more than just a transcendent performer and a
composer with a remarkable capacity to inscribe his own technical abilities
into music of transcendent difficulty. Berlioz is one honourable exception;
Fétis, another. Yet Liszt aspired to Romantic status as a complete artist
through the translation of such ideals into his own music. The curiosity and
audacity which characterised his intellectual and performing lives during

this time were gradually transmuted into a compositional adventurousness
in which he ceased to be an intellectual follower and became a leader. As
such, however, he attracted derision of a kind he had never experienced in
his performing career: in middle age he became the very poète maudit with
whom he had (partially) identified in his youth. Works of the 1850s such
as the B Minor Sonata caused consternation for putting into practice the
Romantic tradition of experimentation with form; the symphonic poems
likewise. Moreover, the late piano pieces reveal Liszt reinterpreting, through
a new harmonic language, a vein of avant-gardism – the exploration of terse
and fragmented gestures – present in lesser-known piano works of the 1830s
such as the two Apparitions of 1834.53
The influences which shaped him as a young man are still detectable in his
old age, and ever closer contact with Wagner, the ultimate self-promoting
Romantic, did not materially change anything: it is to Liszt, not to Wag-
ner, that we owe the New German School. The influence of Lamennais
never left him. Not only because he became, in the most obvious sense, the
artist–priest, or because his enthusiasm was shared by Carolyne zu Sayn-
Wittgenstein, his partner from the late 1840s, but because the late sacred
pieces embody Mennaisian principles. Among them, the unfinished ora-
torio St Stanislaus, on which Liszt was working in the mid-1880s, is an
important act of homage, containing a large dose of Polish nationalism and
a call for the separation of Church and State, in which the Church would
be the dominant partner.54 In 1847, when Liszt gave up his performing
career, he was only on the threshold of the second part of his life’s project:
turning the Romantic performer into the Romantic artist. He became, even
more than Verdi, the nineteenth-century composer whose technique devel-
oped most in the course of his career, the futuristic language of his late
works pushing beyond anything the rest of his generation could imagine.
Yet there are innumerable tensions in Liszt’s artistic path from the Weimar
years onwards, not least in the combination of a continuing adherence to
elements of French Romanticism and social idealism (which Dahlhaus dis-
missed as ‘passé’) and dependence on aristocratic patronage in a bourgeois
town, and a position as a ‘forerunner of the avant-garde’ who nevertheless
allowed the introduction of ‘anachronisms and banalities’ into his music.55
Such contradictions, of course, only bring into sharper focus the paradox
that throughout his life Liszt’s consistency lay in his being a divided self.
2 Inventing Liszt’s life: early biography
and autobiography
a l e x a n d e r re h d i n g
In what has become a famous letter to Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-

Wittgenstein, dated 13 August 1856, Liszt described himself as ‘one half
gypsy, the other Franciscan’.1 In a sense, he was being modest. One can
easily expand the hallmarks of his scintillating public persona into an array
of conflicting images: the flashy virtuoso versus the profound symphonic
composer, the irresistible sex god versus the ascetic Catholic priest, the Hun-
garian nationalist versus the European cosmopolitan. All the facets in this
kaleidoscope of images seem to sit side by side in peaceful coexistence, in
spite and because of their apparently contradictory nature.
In this situation it goes without saying that modern Liszt biographers
have habitually bemoaned the sheer impossibility of the task of painting an
authentic picture of the charismatic musician: his character simply seems
to be too complex, too evasive to be captured by biographical methods.
Thus Alan Walker, Liszt’s most authoritative modern biographer, opens his
three-volume work with a sigh:
The normal way biography is written is to allow the basic materials – letters,
diaries, manuscripts – to disclose the life. And if those materials are missing,
one goes out and finds them. That did not happen with Liszt. Because of the
unparalleled fame, even notoriety, enjoyed by Liszt during his lifetime
(eclipsing by far that of all his musical contemporaries), a complete reversal
of the ‘normal’ process took place. People clamoured for literature about
him. And so the biographies came first; the hard evidence turned up later.2
In fact, one might well say that biography determined Liszt’s life right from
the beginning of his professional life. The fascination with Liszt’s character
was such that biographers hardly allowed Liszt to live his life before it was
turned into a text. The first ‘biographical study’ was published as early as
1835, when Liszt was all of twenty-three years old.3 And by the time he
died, in 1886, the number of biographies had already swollen to extensive
proportions: besides a number of more or less scholarly books that addressed
themselves strictly to biographical matters, the market was flooded with
reminiscences, memoirs and romans-à-clef surrounding Liszt.
It was those latter accounts, highly personal and often sensationalist, that
[14] invariably set the tone for Liszt biography and contributed to the complexity
15 Inventing Liszt’s life
of Liszt’s public image. His former mistress Marie d’Agoult published her
memoirs of Liszt in 1846 under the title Nélida (a re-feminising anagram of
the Christian name of her male nom de plume Daniel Stern), while the hot-
blooded, self-styled ‘Cossack Countess’, known as Olga Janina, published
her suitably melodramatic reminiscences under the title Souvenirs d’une
cosaque (1874). This was followed by a sequel, which was supposed to appear
as though written as a response by Liszt himself, entitled Les mémoirs d’un
pianiste. Janina’s first pseudonym, Robert Franz, was an unfortunate choice,
since it also happened to be the name of a composer in the circle around
Franz Liszt, which must have caused some confusion; for a further sequel,
Les amours d’une cosaque par un ami de l’Abbé ‘X’ ou le roman du pianiste et de
la cosaque, she assumed the name of Sylvia Zorelli. Many a Liszt biographer
has regretted that the best-known examples of Liszt biographies stemmed
from the quill of his spurned lovers; the image drawn in these works seems
surprisingly resilient to revisionist attempts.
While the partly mystifying, partly slanderous accounts presented in
these romans-à-clef paint a somewhat manipulated picture of Liszt – thus
‘tainting’ his image, as Walker has it4 – it would be erroneous to claim that
they have nothing to do with Liszt and his biography. For, at the very least,
these sensationalist and personal views, which helped to sustain an interest in
Liszt, suggested the tantalising possibility not only that this very public artist
had a private side, but also that this private side might just be available. No
one has captured this better than Ken Russell, in whose film Lisztomania –
which takes its title from a genuine nineteenth-century term coined by
no less a figure than Heinrich Heine to describe the fanatic cult sur-
rounding Liszt – the pianist transforms into a scintillating nineteenth-
century rock star (and one strangely scintillating in the style of the 1970s at
that).
What would seem to be missing in this flood of accounts of Liszt’s life is
any sign of his own authoritative voice. Lina Ramann’s epochal biography,
Franz Liszt als Künstler und Mensch (1880–94), was, in its own way, an
attempt to set the record straight. In doing the research for her biography, she
applied a rigorous scientific apparatus: she sent out a series of questionnaires
to Liszt directly, to obtain what she considered to be the most authoritative
answers possible. In this way she hoped to arrive at an objective picture of
the great man’s life and, ideally, to dispose of any such speculations as might
have been fanned by the insinuations of previous biographers. A diary entry
of 12 June 1875 reads:
I have many biographical things to overturn and to correct: Gustav Schilling

[author of an 1844 biography] has committed many a sin – writing a story
instead of history. I had based my own work on his in several places, now
16 Alexander Rehding
my work is a mess, and have to cut out whole passages on which I had spent
great effort.5
This latter part of Ramann’s project, to dispel the myths surrounding Liszt,
was perhaps the least successful, despite the rigour and scientific objectivity
she apparently brought to bear on her project. This was, in no small part, due
to the long-living nature of legend, which is often so much more seductive
and engaging than real life. But what is more, Ramann in turn added her
own brand of hero-worship – though by no means out of the ordinary in
nineteenth-century biographical style – in describing Liszt’s achievements
and character in the most glowing terms. It is not surprising that Ramann’s
work has long been criticised in turn for myth-making, and she herself has
only recently begun to be reappraised as a scholar and biographer.6
I
Liszt is reported to have been angered by biographical inaccuracies. For
most of his life, he was in the habit of correcting his biographies in the
margins of the copies he read.7 However, one must ask nonetheless, if Liszt
was bothered by this to such an extent that he would correct errors in private,
why he kept these corrections to himself. Indeed, one might even ask, why
did he not write an autobiography himself in order to end the myths and
rumours once and for all?
He would have had every opportunity and incentive to do so. Liszt’s
publishers, in any case, would have been all in favour of it, not least because
they were only too aware that his autobiography would easily be a bestseller.
In fact, so vehement was their insistence that Liszt complained in a letter in
1882: ‘I have often been asked by publishers to write my memoirs. I refused
them, saying that it was quite enough for me to live my life, let alone to
commit it to paper.’8
This might seem like a good enough answer for refusing to write an
autobiography. But if we ponder his position a little longer, it turns out
that this position does not quite add up. True, we might well agree that by
1882, as a septuagenarian, Liszt was too old to write himself – he had all but
ceased his publishing activities by 1859. However, Liszt’s letter continues by
pointing out that the situation would be different if he were married: in that
case, he would happily ask his wife to support him in such an enterprise.9
(This practice would not have been entirely new to him, given that most of
his prose works seem to have been ghost-written by, or at least dictated to,
whoever was his girlfriend at the time.10 ) Again, this seems like a reasonable
argument until one probes it a little more: there is no real reason why he
should not entertain the notion of using anyone else’s secretarial services –
all the more so if we consider that at the same time Liszt had no objections to
having his biography written by someone else, namely Lina Ramann. And,
as noted before, Ramann’s exuberant style and obvious devotion to Liszt in
turn introduced a number of deviations from the objective account that she
had set out to write – some of which Liszt proceeded, as was his wont, to
correct in the margins of his own copy.
With this point we have arrived back at square one, and the insight that
if Liszt indeed wanted a reliable biographical account that would satisfy
his apparent dislike for factual errors, he would have to write one himself.
However, this circuitous route opens up an alternative scenario for Liszt’s
factual corrections: it is notable that the corrections he made tended to be in
his private copy and – even in Ramann’s case – not in the published version
that was circulated and would have been read by the public. Is it possible
that while Liszt wanted to distinguish between the truth and fiction, he was
happy for the public to live in a state suspended in between?
To these observations regarding his refusal to write an autobiography, a
further query can be added if we take seriously Liszt’s artistic motto génie
oblige, with which he concludes his article on Paganini and which became
something of a personal motto for him.11 For one of the key obligations of the
genius in the later nineteenth century was in fact to write an autobiography.
Witness the important 1881 article on ‘autobiography’ by Virginia Woolf’s
father Leslie Stephen. He begins his argument with a good dose of Victorian
common sense:
Nobody ever wrote a dull autobiography. If one may make such a bull, the
very dullness would be interesting. The autobiographer has ex officio two
qualifications of supreme importance in all literary work. He is writing
about a topic in which he is keenly interested, and about a topic upon which
he is the highest living authority.12
At the same time, however, Stephen’s Victorian ebullience about the inherent
excellence of autobiography had to be taken with a pinch of salt. Follow-
ing other contemporary views, it is not up to just anybody to write their
autobiography. Thus, the author of an article on ‘Famous Autobiographies’,
published anonymously, as was common, in the Edinburgh Review of 1911,
added a note of caution: ‘No man, but the greatest, can write a thoroughly
good autobiography.’13 These two positions would appear to be at logger-
heads with one another, but it is actually possible to combine their respective
points. Put together, they present us with what amounts to a tautology of
greatness and autobiography in the later nineteenth century, which can be

summed up in the following syllogism:
1. Autobiography is invariably a good read.

2. Only a truly great person can write a good autobiography.
3. Therefore everybody who writes an autobiography must be a truly great
person.
In this concise form, such a view would of course be absurd, but there is
something to be said for the self-sustaining nature of autobiography and
greatness, especially in the context of the genius cult during the late nine-
teenth century. In an intellectual climate that holds, in one way or another,
that history manifests itself in the deeds of great individuals – heroes indeed –
autobiography has a very particular role to fulfil.
Stephen holds up the belief that the genius in particular needs to con-
vey the story of his life to the wider public, as his example forms, in
Stephen’s view, the very basis of the social fabric. Or, in the words of a recent
commentator: ‘The autobiographies of “great men” become the authentic
data which shores up cultural certainties and provides the points between
which the map of Western civilisation is drawn.’14 This strand of thought,
that great individuals have the right and indeed the duty to inform pos-
terity about their exceptional lives, pervades the entire history of modern
autobiography, at least from Benvenuto Cellini onwards.
In fact, the Victorian confidence in autobiography is fostered, on the one
hand, by a Spencerian faith in the progressive perfectibility of mankind, and
on the other, by the belief that autobiography allows pure and unmediated
access to the thoughts of the great man. In a word, the later nineteenth
century perceived autobiography as pure authenticity, as unmediated access
to the truth about greatness for the benefit of all of mankind.15
All the more reason, then, to wonder why Liszt shied away from this
obligation of genius. In fact, his own views on the possibilities of biography –
and by extension, autobiography – turn the circularity of our model into its
vantage point. In other words, while Stephen’s insistence on the authenticity
of autobiography confidently assumed a one-on-one mapping of life onto
autobiographical text, it is also possible to take the opposite stance and
consider the crevices between the two layers of life and biography. However,
as soon as life and biography no longer match each other, this would lead
us down the road of fiction.
There is, of course, a great autobiographical tradition of doing just that,
which was particularly associated with the Romantic movement of the earlier
part of the century – witness works such as Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit
(Fiction and Truth), Jean Paul’s somewhat obscure Conjectural Autobiog-
raphy, which, rather than looking back, outlines the following forty years
of his future life, or indeed Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus. All of these
works – all by favourite authors of Liszt – deliberately blur the boundaries
between fact and fiction. The title of Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, or ‘The Tailor
Redressed’, even makes reference to the enormous scope for self-refashioning
and self-reinvention that autobiography offers.
All these works effectively question the assumptions that Stephen made
about the significance and function of autobiography. In particular, they
pick up on this chasm between those two strata of life and autobiography,
and in this way explore the precarious position of the genre on the borderline
between authenticity and fiction.16 The commonplace relationship between
life and autobiography, namely that life engenders the autobiography, would
have to be rethought.17 As Jean Paul’s conjectural autobiography suggests
above all, the opposite may also be true: the autobiographical project may
in turn produce and determine life. Perhaps, pace Walker, this reversal is the
‘normal’ way for Liszt’s biography after all?
II
It is in this context that we have to consider Liszt’s own views of biography
and life. In an astonishing letter to his official biographer Lina Ramann,
Liszt effectively gave her licence to let her imagination run wild. He wrote:
‘My biography is more to be invented than to be written after the fact’
(‘Meine Biographie ist mehr zu erfinden denn nachzuschreiben’).18 Liszt’s
acknowledgement that life and biography are not identical, and need not
be so, makes no claims to authenticity – at least not in Stephen’s sense – but
rather resonates with the full possibilities of re-fashioning and redressing.
In this situation, where the commonplace link between life and biography
is questioned and biographical access to ‘life’ proper is effectively denied,
Liszt biographers have occasionally tried to revert to his compositions as
the backbone of his biography. This idea, whose origin clearly hails from
romantic music aesthetics, dwells on the notion that a higher authenticity
can be found in Liszt’s musical utterings, and has become something of a
trope in Liszt scholarship:
[A]n enormous amount of his music was confessional – in a way, the

autobiography he didn’t write. It all seems to be there: landscapes observed,
airs overheard; erotic and religious experience, poetry and history, treasures
and trash. It wouldn’t be difficult to draw a picture of his life from his music
alone.19
The idea that music should provide some sort of stability in light of the
biographical licence Liszt gave to Ramann may be comforting; yet it is at
least debatable how successfully such a purely musical biography could be

conveyed. At the same time, the idea of using Liszt’s music, as a kind of
public statement with which he would like to see his audiences engage,
might prove a fruitful starting point for a form of autobiography – as a
decidedly confessional and public act.
The particular notion of autobiography that I want to explore in this
essay shares a few features with this romantic notion of a ‘biography-in-
sounds’ insofar as it would also not take the conventional form of a book.
Beyond that, however, the two part company: it would not seek biography as
immanent in compositions, but rather in the circumstances in which these
compositions might function as autobiographical acts. This form of auto-
biography manifests itself much more in an abstract relationship between
Liszt, as he choreographs his own life in and through his music, and his audi-
ence, which ‘reads’, in a broad sense, these events and may interpret them as
biographically relevant. In other words, certain events may obtain autobi-
ographical significance if the audience acknowledges the identity between
two personae – Liszt (1), the author, and narrator of his own life, and Liszt
(2), the composed subject of this narration – and in this way authenticates
the autobiographical significance of this event.
What I have in mind here are certain autobiographical moments, events
around Liszt’s person, that attained autobiographical status. Liszt unde-
niably lived those moments, experienced them, but seemed at the same
time to have been anxious to choreograph them so that they would be
received by his adoring audience in the correct spirit. Indeed, this con-
cept of autobiography – as a relationship between Liszt and his ‘readers’,
the concert-going public – might go a long way to explaining why he so
adamantly refused to write down his memoirs: ‘It is enough for me to live
my life, let alone to commit it to paper.’ With our sharpened sensitivities
to the precarious nature of the phrase ‘my life’, which has become detached
from what may be committed to paper, we should prick up our ears at
this statement. (The literal translation from the German ‘to live through my
life’, or ‘mein Leben zu durchleben’, is more emphatic than the English.)
We are now in a position to understand that Liszt had no interest in writ-
ing down his life; in a way, he had done this already in this performative
fashion of autobiography, and therefore needed no longer to ‘commit it to
paper’.
Although an exhaustive analysis would be beyond the scope of this chap-
ter, I would suggest that it was only thanks to this performative mode of
autobiography, suggesting an incontestable immediacy and authoritative
authenticity, which is at once fiction and fact, that Liszt succeeded in por-
traying the many biographical images of himself – priest and Don Juan,
shallow virtuoso and deep thinker – without tripping up in their inherent
contradictions. In short, that which would be too incredible for fiction

becomes possible ‘in life’.
III
The autobiographical moment I want to discuss here, by way of illustration,
is the moment of transformation from his virtuoso career to his second
career as a self-consciously great composer. This event was the unveiling
of the Beethoven monument at Bonn on 10–13 August 1845, which was
among the first public statues dedicated to a composer in Germany.20
In 1845 Liszt enjoyed European-wide fame as a piano virtuoso. It was no
doubt on account of his celebrity status that Liszt was invited to participate
in the celebrations for the unveiling of the monument, although some cynics
were quick to point out that Liszt’s donation of 10,000 francs might have
also had something to do with it. The donation covered almost a quarter of
the overall cost and ensured that Liszt was constantly in the limelight of the
four-day celebrations.21
In the end, Liszt performed in no fewer than five functions: he was the
chief donor; he was appointed an honorary member of the organising
committee; he was commissioned to play the solo part of Beethoven’s Fifth
Piano Concerto; was commissioned to conduct part of the festival’s con-
certs; and last but not least, was commissioned to compose a festival cantata.
This cantata was one of only two commissioned compositions for the cele-
brations – the other being a Festival Ode by the president of the committee
and university director of music, Heinrich Karl Breidenstein.
It must be remembered that the sheer size of the celebrations, involv-
ing almost three thousand guests, was no mean feat in the mid-nineteenth
century: the most famous musicians of Europe, not to mention the inter-
national press – all would be present in provincial Bonn to celebrate the
dead composer. In short, everybody knew that the unveiling of the Bonn
monument to the great man was an occasion to make (or break) a musical
career.22
In this competitive, sometimes outright hostile climate, Liszt’s involve-
ment was not universally appreciated. He was, after all, only a piano virtu-
oso – a position which for all its glamour always smacked of charlatanism,
superficiality and immorality – while he had virtually no reputation as a
conductor or composer. Anton Schindler, for instance, always intent on
protecting Beethoven’s heritage from the meddling of others, engaged in a
veritable media war against Liszt:
Far be it from me, neither to the pleasure of some nor the displeasure of
others . . . to put a sordino, that is: a damper on to the excessive racket about
Mr. Liszt. The truth must in any case be weightier than ten thousand
francs . . . However, some gentlemen in Bonn bow their knee before [this
sum of money], because its sound is just the kind that affixes itself best to
their aural nerves.23
One particular event surrounding Liszt must have irked Schindler: in 1823,
the 11-year-old Liszt had been introduced to Beethoven by none other than
Schindler himself and played the piano before the composer. Beethoven
had apparently been so enraptured by the performance that he had stormed
onto the stage and had kissed the young Liszt on the forehead.24 Liszt is
known to have attached great significance to Beethoven’s ‘kiss of consecra-
tion’, or Weihekuß, which was soon stylised into a symbolic act. Schindler
felt threatened, and tried to undermine Liszt’s position. He even sank so
low as to forge Beethoven’s conversation books to evoke the impression
that Beethoven had disliked Liszt.25 (A forgery, by the way, that was not
discovered for 120 years.)
The cherished and well-documented event in the biography of Liszt was
the key to this ‘autobiographical moment’, as it allowed him to consolidate
his reputation as Beethoven’s consecrated heir. This famous episode was
particularly played out in the events surrounding the commissioned festival
cantata. Such a festival commission was a delicate task, as the spectacular
failure of Breidenstein’s Ode shows. The critic of the Wiener Allgemeine
Musik-Zeitung, which may count as representative of the international press
in this instance, did not mince his words when he gave the work the thumbs
down:
Even though Herr Breidenstein may have had the understandable wish, as
the president of the committee, as the local director of music, to occupy
himself during the festival, he should never force his compositions on us,
where [famous composers such as] Spohr, Lindpaintner, etc. were present at
the festival. As surely every modest man would have done when asked to
compose a festive chorus, Herr Breidenstein would have done well to refuse
the honour, which ought only to be made available to the oldest of the
foremost living German composers.26
It should be added, in all fairness, that Breidenstein had greatly annoyed

the journalists by refusing to hand out free tickets to the international press,
which would certainly have added to the negative impression of Breiden-
stein’s composition. Yet the Viennese critic is making an important point: it
is not up to just anyone to honour Beethoven, the person doing the honour-
ing is by implication valorised as worthy of fulfilling such an office. There
is a certain reciprocity at work, which could be described concisely with
a slightly changed version of a Goethean bon mot: ‘He who commends,
condescends.’ (In fact, Goethe himself is more lenient: ‘Wer lobt, stellt sich
gleich.’)
Liszt’s festival cantata, by contrast, won almost unanimous praise. Here
is our Viennese critic again:
Even though the composition on the whole lacks some unified form, as well
as some unified idea, it is still possible to discern something extraordinary
in the totality of the composition . . . I consider this work not only as one of
the most interesting in Liszt’s oeuvre, but in the field of contemporary
composition on the whole. With this work, Liszt has raised great
expectations for the future.27
What had happened? How come Liszt was worthy where Breidenstein
had been blasphemous? As we have already seen, from Liszt’s perspective, the
Beethoven commemoration offered a unique opportunity to round off and
consolidate his reputation as Beethoven’s consecrated heir,28 which allowed
him to build on his international fame as a brilliant virtuoso to become
a serious (that is: great) composer. However, this only explains half of the
story.
There is also a specific musical reason that his cantata was accepted where
Breidenstein’s had failed. Liszt had in fact employed a very clever compo-
sitional device: he had used a quotation from Beethoven’s very popular
‘Archduke’ Trio in B major. Liszt’s version first introduces it as a chorale,
a kind of ‘secular Sanctus’,29 in praise of Beethoven, and follows some of
the variations that Beethoven himself composed. However, finally he mon-
umentalises the theme in a concluding apotheosis: where the original is an
intimate piece of chamber music, Liszt’s final version, significantly marked
Andante religioso, blows the theme up into gigantic proportions, played fff
by the grand symphony orchestra with chorus, to the words ‘Hail, hail,
Beethoven!’
It is of course more than a coincidence that the orchestral and vocal
forces of the Cantata for the Inauguration of the Bonn Beethoven Monument
are virtually identical with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. With this artistic
ploy, Liszt was not put in the awkward position of condescending to praise
Beethoven. On the contrary, audience and critics registered it as a graceful
bow towards the master. Liszt let Beethoven speak for himself, and praise
himself. Or so it would seem, because – as in Breidenstein’s failed attempt
earlier – the praise is always reciprocal. It is none other than Liszt’s later
biographer Ramann who best captures the inherent ambiguity, when she
writes: ‘With this device, he had characterised the essence of the genius of
Beethoven and glorified it as though through himself.’ Through Beethoven’s
genius or Liszt’s, one should ask – which would seem precisely the point.
Liszt may have appeared to let Beethoven speak for himself, but what really
Example 2.1 Liszt, Beethoven Cantata no. 1. Andante religioso
happened was that Liszt cleverly used Beethoven’s voice from beyond the
grave to let the dead composer speak out for him.
What makes this event an autobiographical moment is not the simple
fact of the quotation from Beethoven. It would certainly be misguided to
claim that any musical quotation is automatically an act of autobiograph-
ical self-refashioning. Rather, what is crucial about the autobiographical
moment is the context in which it occurred, which allowed the split into
Liszt (1) the composer, that is the narrator of his biography, and Liszt (2) the
composed self, the subject of his own narration. The audience is encouraged
to assume that these two are the same person, as we have seen is common
in autobiography, but we can only understand the underlying mechanisms
if we finely distinguish between the two.
What in fact happened at the unveiled Beethoven memorial was that
Liszt (1), the composer-narrator, assumed Beethoven’s voice, to allow Liszt
(2), the subject of the narrative, to enter the Beethovenian lineage. This
autobiographical split was possible only in this particular situation. (In this
sense, a subsequent performance of the same work in Paris under Habeneck
had practically no autobiographical interest.)
If it were possible to pinpoint a moment in Liszt’s life that was the start-
ing point of his career as a self-consciously great composer, it would be
this day, 13 August 1845. With this moment, Liszt consciously stepped into
the sublime symphonic tradition for which Beethoven was remembered in
the mid-nineteenth century.30 With the cantata of 1845, with this autobio-
graphical moment, then, Liszt had transformed his career from the image
of the flashy virtuoso to that of the serious composer, apparently anointed
by Beethoven himself.
IV
But if the cantata was instrumental in Liszt’s autobiographical re-fashioning,
it should be examined in a little more detail, as it can tell us more about
the biographical status of this work. We should therefore return to Liszt’s
motto génie oblige.
The libretto of the cantata was written by the now all-but-forgotten Jena
poet O. F. Bernhard Wolff, to whom Liszt had been introduced in Thuringia
a few years previously. Liszt was quite interested in the text and commented
on it in a letter of 1845:
At least the text [of the Bonn Beethoven Cantata] is rather novel; it is a kind
of Magnificat to the human genius seized by God in eternal revelation
across time and space. The text could just as well be applied to Goethe, or
Raphael, or Columbus as to Beethoven.31
However, if the precise name of the genius is unspecified, his list might also be
extended to include Liszt himself. This would be of considerable significance,
as it became more and more apparent in mid-nineteenth-century culture –
and nowhere more so than in music history since Beethoven’s death – that
the rise of the genius also implied, as its negative counterpart, the epigone.32
At the same time, the public discourse about the genius had changed sub-
stantially over the course of the nineteenth century. As our Victorian com-
mentators initially underlined, the genius came to occupy a more and more
public position in the national imagination. In fact, the second movement
of Liszt’s Beethoven Cantata spells out the particular demands on the genius
in nineteenth-century nationalistic historiography:
If the Prince represents his people

In subsequent annals,
Who represents their pain,
Who announces how they suffered?
Who rises up for them in the book of World History?
Makes their name radiate across the course of times?
Poor Mankind, cruel fate!
Who is sent out by you at the end of the day?
The Genius!
Eternally great in his works!33
It is important to note that Wolff’s text withholds Beethoven’s name until

the very end of the work. In Liszt’s setting, by contrast, all these pressing
questions are answered by the quotation from the ‘Archduke’ Trio, which
succeeds the chorus’s lengthy extolments of the genius. In this way, Liszt’s
setting specified the answer that the libretto had left open in this general way,
and made explicit reference to Beethoven. However, since he had composed
himself into the Cantata, as we have seen, the work also made reference
to himself. The carte blanche that the cantata text offered was now dou-
bly filled with Liszt the new genius-composer, besides Beethoven the dead
genius.
In this way, Liszt was able to fulfil his self-imposed obligation, expressed
in his motto génie oblige. He had written an autobiography, and a very public
one at that. In doing so, he had not only established his position as a great
composer, not an epigone, but had also assumed the public responsibilities of
the genius. In other words, with this autobiographical moment, constructed
by and for the public, Liszt had written himself into the hall of fame of
musical geniuses, alongside Beethoven.
It is perhaps no coincidence that in the only strictly autobiographical
document of Liszt that has come down to us, an entry for a biographical
encyclopedia of 1881 – the year before Liszt explained his refusal to write an
autobiography – the Beethoven statue plays a prominent role. In fact, when

Liszt was sent the proofs, he corrected them in his usual fashion; Liszt’s
first substantial addition to the text is: ‘He has notably contributed to the
monument for Beethoven erected at Bonn in 1845.’34 It is one of the rare
moments in Liszt’s biography when he confirms in writing, and expressly
lets the public know, that this event had a particular significance for him.
Whether it was the significance ascribed to this event in this essay, we can –
and should – but guess.
3 Liszt and the twentieth century1
ja m e s d e av i l l e
Introduction: the problem of Liszt

At the turn of the nineteenth century, less than two decades after his death,
Franz Liszt’s claims to immortality seemed built on rather shaky ground.
True, his name remained associated with the greatest career of pianistic
virtuosity of all times, yet that type of notoriety was in many ways antithetical
to a place within the pantheon of music history.2 Of his musical works
beyond those for the piano, only the two concertos, Les Préludes and the
Faust Symphony were being performed at the time in Europe and North
America with any regularity, and it was primarily popular piano works like
the Liebesträume and the Hungarian Rhapsodies that appeared in anthologies
of piano music.
This marginal position for Liszt is all the more surprising since during
his lifetime, above all before his departure from the concert stage in 1847, he
was one of the best-known musical personalities in Europe, indeed, a leading
figure within the culture of the times. Publication figures provide concrete
evidence for his tremendous popularity during the 1840s (see below, ‘Pub-
lishing’), as do reports in the newspapers about the raging ‘Lisztomania’
in his concert cities.3 In later years, Liszt’s lingering notoriety as performer
ensured that his activities would attract interest in the musical and daily
press.
So what happened to diminish Liszt’s fame? As virtuoso, Liszt not only
participated in what was generally considered to be a shallow or superfi-
cial artistry, but also positioned himself first and foremost as a recreative
musician, who excelled in presenting the works of others. When he did turn
to composition away from the keyboard, in Weimar, the critics and public
by and large did not take the results seriously or considered them to be
too experimental.4 If anything, these criticisms intensified after his death,
when his music was neither in the canon nor considered ‘avant-garde’. Thus
throughout the twentieth century, we find the dual stereotype of shallow
composition on the one hand and historically rather than aesthetically sat-
isfying music on the other, which would render Liszt’s place in the teaching
studio and on the concert stage rather difficult. As Sacheverell Sitwell wrote
in 1934, ‘there have been so many attempts to demolish his reputation, so
many assurances that we must have a natural antipathy to his music and
[28]
29 Liszt and the twentieth century
need not, for that reason, take any trouble to increase our knowledge of
him’.5
The ‘problem of Liszt’ in the twentieth century extended further:
Bayreuth under Liszt’s daughter Cosima had little interest in carrying on
his legacy (even though he was buried there). Thus, the major Liszt com-
memoration of the year 1936 took place in Bayreuth, and yet, according
to Walter Abendroth, both the sixty-year anniversary of the Ring premiere
and the fifty-year observance of the death of Ludwig II took precedence for
the festive occasion.6 Liszt came to be seen as a helper of Wagner, heroically
promoting and defending his friend and enabling the Master to fulfil his
destiny, but whose own independent creative activity, whether as composer
or writer, did not bear comparison with Wagner’s work. This was reinforced
during the 1930s by the National Socialists, who unproblematically appro-
priated Liszt as German Vorkämpfer for their political, cultural and social
ideas, despite his attachment to other, especially Hungarian and French, cul-
tures, his grounding in French socialist thought and his ongoing support of
Jewish musicians. Again, Liszt’s own original work was ignored, in favour of
his activities to support Wagner and other musicians as conductor, teacher,
writer, friend and – to use Liszt’s own modification of noblesse oblige – génie
oblige.
We must also consider Liszt’s ultimate identity in the twentieth century as
‘international’, ‘supranational’ or ‘European’ composer (to use the various
terms applied to him): while nations were eager to appropriate him as one
of their own, this could not and did not occur at the cost of composers who
were squarely situated within that particular musical culture. Of the nations
that laid claim to Liszt, only Hungary promoted him as a composer who was
essential to the national canon, and, as a result, Liszt never really became a
problem for the Hungarians.
Still, Liszt was more than a national composer, and his music had
an impact, a significant impact, upon the twentieth century that extends
beyond national boundaries. The following discussion investigates Liszt in
the twentieth century by looking at the different ways in which Liszt came
to influence specific groups of consumers, whether composers, performers,
scholars or general public: publishing, performance/recording, composition
and scholarship.
Issues
The major issue behind such a study is that of determining influence, since
any attempt to assess Liszt’s ‘afterlife’ in the twentieth century necessarily
involves uncovering the manifestations of his life, thought and work as
30 James Deaville
they had an impact upon individuals and groups of individuals. Harold

Bloom’s theory of influence works well for literature and specific pieces
by a given composer,7 as does Julia Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality,8
yet these theoretical approaches do not assist much when dealing with a
musician’s influence over future generations, which is often reduced to
traces, the further removed we are from his/her sphere of immediate efficacy.
While a purely linear, chronological approach would illustrate how ‘Liszt’
responded to social and political change in the twentieth century, that model
of transmission denies the possibility of the ‘multi-voicedness’ of the original
work, of the ability of a composition (or idea, biographical detail, myth,
etc.) to speak variously to recipients at different times, as argued by Mikhail
Bakhtin.9 Our focus on modes of production, which derives both from
Hans-Robert Jauss’s theory of reception and Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of
‘symbolic goods’,10 will enable us to focus on the various aspects of Liszt’s
personal and musical legacy as they worked their way into culture.
Subordinate issues and problems for uncovering Liszt’s influence in
the twentieth century cluster themselves according to the individual fields
of production/consumption. For publications, information about which
works were available is crucial, as supported by date of publication, size of
print-run and format of publication. Unfortunately, the unavailability or
destruction of publishers’ archives during the twentieth century has made
such research quite difficult. Above all, it is hard to ascertain which works
and how many copies of them were in circulation, and how many were in the
hands of amateurs or non-performing music lovers. Concert and recorded
performances are more readily quantifiable, and certain performers have
made careers through promoting the music of Liszt, up to the present, yet
there exists no study of Liszt in performance during the twentieth century
other than in discographies (recordings of ‘live’ performances). The first
generation of composers may have studied under Liszt pupils, based works
on specific pieces of his, or written about his legacy – these sometimes
elusive influences need to be tracked down in personal correspondence,
collections of essays, or in individual compositions. However, as we shall
see, what a composer writes about Liszt may or may not be a truthful
representation of his/her feelings. Later in the twentieth century, the com-
positional influence becomes more elusive, as it moves from use and choice
of programme, thematic material and form to texture, harmonic details
and motivic set. Here the fragments of Lisztian influence are hard to iden-
tify indeed, if they can be isolated from other elements. The one group of
exceptions are compositions written in homage to Liszt, where the connec-
tion is foregrounded and thus intended to be heard. Finally, scholars have
uncovered and clarified much about Liszt by making available unknown
primary sources (autograph letters, documents including memoirs from
his circle of acquaintances, contemporary reviews and reports in the press),

and basing new insights into his life and work upon them, yet the inter-
pretation of these sources has varied widely, depending on the scholar and
his/her historical, cultural and social context. These factors must be taken
into account when considering Liszt scholarship in the twentieth century,
although they should not be grounds for necessarily dismissing any research
out of hand.
This dissemination of Liszt’s influence occurred to such a degree that we
can comfortably maintain at the outset that few composers of the nineteenth
century, except possibly Wagner, had the same influence upon succeeding
generations as Liszt did. Indeed, one is hard-pressed to think of an inno-
vative composer of the early twentieth century who was not influenced by
Liszt’s music, especially in its departures from traditional harmonies and
novel approaches to form and formal unity (but contrary to musicological
myth, the experimental late works were not known until 1927, and thus
could not have influenced early twentieth-century innovators like Schoen-
berg or Bartók).11 Beyond the notes themselves, at least four other factors
ensured Liszt a lasting legacy: (1) His commitment to pedagogy meant that
a host of students (400, by one count) carried the legacy of Liszt to all
corners of the world, passing it on through live and recorded performance
and teaching. (2) He encouraged the development of national schools of
composition, in France, Russia, Bohemia, Hungary and the Scandinavian
countries, through friendships with the composers and his own model of
nationalist composition. (3) The ongoing public love affair with the piano
meant that Liszt’s piano music would remain in circulation and continue
to serve as a living part of the European cultural legacy. (4) Finally, Liszt
was a fascinating person, one of the most paradoxical and complicated fig-
ures of the nineteenth century, and as such he has consistently attracted
considerable interest from the general public and scholars.
General chronology
Despite previous arguments against pure chronology, it is important to
recognise that the role of Liszt in the twentieth century cannot be divorced
from those historical events, political movements and socio-cultural devel-
opments that shaped the century. Indeed, as occurred with other artists from
the past, he was used to support or legitimate political ideologies ranging
from fascism to communism. Most recently, Liszt has come to represent an
early advocate of internationalist ‘Europeanism’, of the ideals manifested in
the European Union.12 However, as Oliver Rathkolb has observed, ‘every
regime had attempted in its way to develop a diverse national image of Liszt,
32 James Deaville
in order to fit him into the realm of the political propaganda of that time’.13
And these appropriations of Liszt would influence concerts and publica-
tions of Liszt’s music, scholarship about him and even the composition of
music. Liszt’s inherent ambiguity and heterogeneity in so many aspects of
his work and life made him particularly vulnerable to such interpretations
and uses, whereby we could say that the musical landscape of the twentieth
century is littered with ‘Liszts’, each purporting to be the ‘authentic’ Liszt
and yet participating in the most varied cultural work.
This last point is worthy of some elaboration. Time and again recent
authors have pointed to the heterogeneity in Liszt’s work, the ‘juxtaposing of
significant and banal [elements] . . . of harmonic excessiveness and sonorous
simplicity’,14 which has hindered the acceptance of those pieces. However,
we can easily extend the oppositions to his life and activities: German or
Hungarian (or French) identity, ‘demon’ of the keyboard or cleric of the
Catholic Church, musical charlatan or genius. Liszt was a complex person
and composer, and it is these inherent, patently irreconcilable contradictions
in his life and creative activity that have served at once to hinder the work of
biographers and analysts who would seek to bring order and clarity in the
service of ‘objective truth’ and to encourage the work of those who would
seek to enlist him to enable some political, social or cultural goal.
Turning to general history, as Liszt entered the twentieth century, the
world that he knew was about to change drastically, the optimism and belief
in progress that characterised the late nineteenth century would be shattered
artistically and politically. Liszt’s principles of humanism had little place in
the new world order, and his best-known music, that for piano, seemed out
of place in modern Europe, even though it was through the performances
and recordings of his piano pupils that the memory and legacy of Liszt were
best kept alive in the first decades of the twentieth century. The most notable
Liszt achievement of the early twentieth century was the collaborative work
on the first collected edition of the musical works (1907–36). The jubilee
of his birth in 1911 was recognised in various German locations, but any
lasting after-effects were hindered by the war. In the 1930s, Liszt became
the focus of national-political debates over national identity. Even before
the Liszt year of 1936, which was a major year for publishing about him,
Liszt had been (surprisingly) appropriated by the Third Reich as a banner
bearer for National Socialism,15 at the same time as he was the subject of
‘Magyarising’ in Hungary.16 The years after the Second World War brought
a significant change to Liszt’s position within Europe: the historical culti-
vation of Liszt in Eastern Europe led to a special status under Socialism, in
comparison with Western Europe. For example, the German Democratic
Republic significantly promoted Liszt as harbinger of their political system
and its aesthetic principles (as the National Socialists did), whereby the GDR
mounted the major German commemoration for Liszt in 1961. Character-

istic of the Eastern European cultivation of Liszt was an emphasis upon
performances in festivals and competitions. As Liszt scholarship dramati-
cally increased during the 1970s and 1980s, the political boundaries became
more permeable, although the proliferation of national Liszt societies, peri-
odicals and research centres may have also led to a fragmenting of Liszt along
national lines. Indeed, it is indicative that one of the major conferences from
1986 (Eisenstadt) centred on Liszt as received in the individual European
countries and North America. The centenary of Liszt’s death also was the
occasion for the highlighting of several new Liszt projects, including the the-
matic catalogue and the collected writings. The rise of the European Union
and the downfall of Socialism resulted in a significantly greater mobility for
performers and scholars and greater access to sources. However, through-
out the twentieth century, regardless of political system, there was always a
basic level of ongoing interest in Liszt on the part of individual composers,
performers and scholars that maintained and disseminated the legacy of
Liszt.
Publishing
Arguably, Liszt was one of the most published piano composers of the nine-
teenth century: for example, the print-runs for his virtuoso keyboard works
published by important Leipzig house Friedrich Hofmeister surpass those
for such illustrious colleagues as Robert Schumann and Chopin.17 That same
distinction, however, does not apply to his late piano compositions, some of
which were not published until the later 1920s. While the great majority of
Liszt’s works appeared in print during his lifetime, sometimes in multiple
editions, the non-keyboard music was no longer readily available soon after
his death. Some of this neglect may be attributed to ignorance caused by the
obscuring ‘myth’ of Liszt as primarily a keyboard composer,18 some of it to
the complexity of the source situation (the multiple versions of many Liszt
pieces), some of it to a general disinterest in, if not disinclination toward,
Liszt and his music, at least in the early to mid-twentieth century.19
The need for a collected edition of his music was identified soon after
Liszt’s death, and indeed, one of the great tasks of twentieth-century Liszt
scholarship has been to arrive at a definitive edition. A monumental effort
in the first half of the century (specifically, from 1907 to 1936) was the
incomplete 34-volume edition of Liszt’s collected works – undertaken by the
Franz-Liszt-Stiftung and published by Breitkopf und Härtel – which boasted
the collaboration of such illustrious musicians as Béla Bartók, Ferruccio
Busoni, Eugène d’Albert and José Vianna da Motta, as well as important
34 James Deaville
scholars like Peter Raabe and Berthold Kellermann.20 The significance of

this edition cannot be overestimated, for it brought a number of little-
known or unknown works to light, revealed the complexity of sources
for many of Liszt’s compositions and provided the scholar, performer and
public with both generally reliable editions and an overview of Liszt’s diverse
oeuvre. In particular, Vianna da Motta’s publication in 1927 of the last
volume of Verschiedene Werke für Pianoforte zu zwei Händen was a revela-
tion for the musical world,21 since it contained such remarkable late pieces as
‘Nuages gris’, ‘Unstern’ and ‘Schlaflos’. Liszt could definitively take his place
as one of the pioneers of experimental composition, as an innovator who
anticipated the discoveries of early twentieth-century composers, above all
in the dissolution of tonality. This edition nevertheless suffered from a
number of flaws:22 it did not publish groups of compositions, such as the
oratorios Christus and Die Legende von der heiligen Elisabeth, the organ
music and most of the piano transcriptions and paraphrases; many of the
sources were not consulted; editors, among whom were Liszt pupils, took
the liberty to change or improve on the music, based on their recollections of
Liszt’s performance; the editors even made changes to the music itself when
it seemed too experimental (such as the second ending of the orchestral
version of the Mephisto Waltz No. 1).
The war brought a cessation of publication activity, cutting short the
completion of the edition. As early as 1958, however, discussions were
under way between Editio Musica in Budapest and Deutscher Verlag für
Musik in Leipzig regarding the completion of the collected edition. Given
the problems stated above, it quickly became apparent that a completely
new edition was required. Discussions were so far along that the editorial
principles were already in place by 1961, the 150th anniversary of Liszt’s
birth.23 The East German publisher pulled out in 1966, but Editio Musica
continued preparations on its own,24 and in 1970 could publish the first vol-
ume of the New Liszt Edition (Neue Liszt-Ausgabe), consisting of part of the
études. During the twentieth century, over thirty volumes were published
by such distinguished Hungarian scholars as Imre Sulyok (editor-in-chief)
and Mária Eckhardt. This collected edition was also not without its ques-
tionable editorial policies, in particular to publish only the final version of
a work, under the assumption that the changes represent Liszt’s corrections
and final thoughts.25
Other large-scale twentieth-century publications of Liszt’s music con-
tributed to the availability of the music to performer and scholar, although
the majority of these editions were of the piano music. The British Liszt
Society published eleven volumes of piano music, songs and chamber music
between 1950 and 1996, in editions that were well suited to performance.
Emil von Sauer edited twelve volumes of Liszt’s most familiar and popular
piano music, which appeared under the C. F. Peters imprint in 1917 (as an
alternative to the Breitkopf edition). In its tradition of producing ‘Urtext’
editions for pianists, Henle in Munich published eight volumes of the leading
sets of works by Liszt from 1975. But perhaps the most impressive edito-
rial achievement of the late twentieth century, apart from the new collected
edition, was Martin Haselböck’s ten-volume edition of the organ music
(1985–99, Universal in Vienna), which is exemplary for its editing, print-
ing and commentary. Among various ‘national’ editions of Liszt’s music,
particularly valuable is a Russian seven-volume ‘complete’ edition of the
operatic transcriptions, from 1958 to 1968.
Performance/recording
As already mentioned, the dissemination of Liszt’s music and influence in
the twentieth century had much to do with the large number of his piano
students who pursued successful performing careers throughout the world,
and passed on the Liszt legacy in turn to their own students. And Liszt stu-
dents were greatly in demand as teachers: the importance of pedigree in the
performing world meant that pupils of Liszt and, later, their pupils would
be sought by aspirants to pianistic greatness. By some estimates, Liszt taught
over 400 students throughout a life that in all of its stages valued the training
of the future generation. Liszt held regular ‘master classes’ in his Weimar
residences, in the Altenburg during the 1850s and in the Hofgärtnerei dur-
ing the 1870s and 1880s. The first generation brought such talented pupils
as von Bülow, Tausig, Klindworth, Hans and Ingeborg von Bronsart and
Mason (several of whom lived into the twentieth century), while in the later
years Liszt taught Friedheim, Göllerich, Lamond, Joseffy, Menter, Timanoff,
Ansorge, Vianna da Motta, Reisenauer, Rosenthal, Sauer, Siloti, Stradal and
Thomán (among many others, most of whom were active also in the twen-
tieth century). As a sampling of dissemination, ‘Liszt’ was spread in the
United States by Mason, in Hungary by Thomán, in Russia by Siloti, in Italy
by Sgambati, in France by Jaëll and in Portugal and South America by Vianna
da Motta. Of Liszt’s students, at least fifty became noted as performers in
their own right, and nineteen of them left behind recordings of their playing
eighty-five of his works.26 It is this performing and recorded legacy of Liszt’s
music, once removed from him yet with strong claims to authenticity, that
would carry not only the piano compositions but also his performance prac-
tice into the twentieth century.27 Of course, some late-nineteenth-century
pianists did not study with Liszt but played his music (Paderewski and
36 James Deaville
Hofmann, for example), yet the pupils could lay claim to ‘authenticity’,
which interested the twentieth century to the extent that the students could
give an idea of how the ‘world’s greatest virtuoso’ himself performed.
Of course, the Liszt ‘family’ exponentially increased as his students took
up teaching in their respective countries and cities. Among the next genera-
tion are such pre-eminent twentieth-century performers as Bartók (taught
by Thomán) and Rachmaninov (taught by Siloti). It is not necessary to trace
the careers of all the pianists and their students to confirm how they kept
the music of Liszt alive during the twentieth century, even at times when
his popularity was at a low point within the musical community in general.
However, studying the life, career and works of a leading ‘Liszt pianist’ of
the early twentieth century (whose Liszt interpretations were also recorded)
does provide insights into how a performer could keep Liszt in the public’s
eye through a broad range of activities (including composition).
Probably the most open and enthusiastic Liszt exponent in the early
twentieth century, and some would say the musician who most closely mod-
elled himself and his work on Liszt, was the Italian (–German) piano virtu-
oso and composer Ferruccio Busoni.28 Indeed, contemporaries recognised
him ‘as the true successor to Liszt, with whom no Paderewski or Rachmani-
nov could seriously be compared’.29 Both his parents were musicians, and
his father encouraged him along the path of prodigy, which he initiated
with a public performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto in C Minor at the
age of 8. In 1877, Busoni heard Liszt play and was introduced to him; this
encounter with Liszt was followed by Martin Wegelius’s encouragement of
a serious interest in Liszt (1888–90, while Busoni was a piano teacher at
the Musikinstitut in Helsinki), which then grew from year to year. In 1894,
Busoni decided on a performing career, and to facilitate that he ‘began the
study of the piano again by taking as his guide the works of Liszt’.30 Liszt
would eventually become one element of an ‘elective ancestral triumvirate
which lies at the root of all his mature works: Bach – Mozart – Liszt’.31 Busoni
presents one of the most complex and richest instances of Lisztrezeption in
the twentieth century: on the one hand, he actively promoted the cause of
Liszt by playing his music throughout a long career as virtuoso (he liked to
perform the Transcendental Etudes and the Années de pèlerinage as sets);32
producing twenty-two transcriptions and arrangements of music by Liszt,
including the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 19 and the ‘Heroic March in Hun-
garian Style’;33 authoring four essays about Liszt;34 and planning a collected
edition of Liszt’s works and editing the Liszt Etudes for publication in that
undertaking.35 But on the other hand, as a result of this intense preoccupa-
tion with Liszt, Busoni’s original music carried key components of Liszt’s
musical legacy forward into the twentieth century – most broadly speaking,
thematic transformation, transcription, virtuosity – in such compositions as
the Piano Concerto, the Indianische Fantasie, and the ‘Zigeunerlied’. Sitwell
provides a fascinating insight into the wide-ranging, restless genius of Liszt
and Busoni when he writes that ‘both of them, with their exceptional, mag-
ical powers, were forever searching for a secret that was never revealed to
them, or was only suffered to live in flashes before their eyes for the space
of a few moments’.36
Busoni moreover perpetuated Liszt’s legacy through his teaching. A
number of his pupils and friends formed a closely knit group of pianists,
called the ‘Busoni network’ by Marc-André Roberge.37 The other major
figure in this network was Kaikhosru Sorabji, who championed the music
of Liszt and Busoni in his own compositions and writings.38 For exam-
ple, between 1940 and 1944, Sorabji published 100 piano studies under
the title Etudes transcendantes: as Michael Habermann noted, ‘the dazzling
virtuosity of composer-pianists in the Lisztian tradition, such as Ferruccio
Busoni and Leopold Godowsky, further inspired Sorabji to write music
that would make the utmost technical and musical demands upon the
interpreter’.39 Sorabji’s Fantaisie espagnole from 1919 also clearly harks
back to the tradition of ostensibly ‘Spanish’ works like Liszt’s Rhapsodie
espagnole. Other members of this Busoni network of pianist-composers who
as his friends or students brought the Liszt legacy well into the twentieth
century were Leopold Godowsky, Percy Grainger, Gunnar Johansen, Egon
Petri and Ronald Stevenson. Here we observe a clear series of lines for the
dissemination of Liszt, inspired by a particularly active enthusiast (Busoni).
A certain bifurcation occurred within Liszt performance in the second
half of the twentieth century, as virtuosity regained a respectability in the
eyes of the public and musicians. While a Liszt pianist like Alfred Brendel
would provide solid, well-considered renditions of the music, Earl Wild and
others worked to restore the flamboyance of performer and performance,
in the spirit of Liszt’s own physical, highly charged presentations of the
late 1830s and the 1840s. And even for less ‘extravagant’ players, works like
the Schubert or Chopin song transcriptions or selections from the Années
de pèlerinage or the Concert Studies would fill out a programme. Festivals
provided the opportunity for all-Liszt concerts, which might exclusively
feature works from one of the larger sets and as such became a ne plus ultra
for pianists (and audiences). It was not uncommon that concerts associated
with Liszt would involve more than one pianist, whereby the experience of
the concert as an extravaganza would be created,40 in emulation of Romantic
virtuoso practices.
In the last decades of the century, a new type of Liszt performer emerged,
who was equally proficient and knowledgeable as performer and scholar.
The two leading exponents of this approach to Liszt are Kenneth Hamilton
and Leslie Howard, both from Great Britain. Concert pianist Hamilton
38 James Deaville
produced a valuable study of the Sonata in B Minor,41 while Howard –

whose 95-CD complete recording of Liszt’s piano music is one of the great
musical achievements of the twentieth century42 – edited the Liszt Society
Journal and published unknown works of Liszt.
Of course, the piano music was not the only part of Liszt’s compositional
oeuvre performed and recorded in the twentieth century (although it made
up the great majority of performances). Above all, the piano concertos and
orchestrated versions of the Hungarian Rhapsodies were able to maintain
themselves in orchestral repertoires. However, with the exception of Les
Préludes and possibly the Faust Symphony, the other orchestral music did
not enter into repertoires,43 and in fact declined in performance frequency
into the 1950s.44 Danièle Pistone surveyed the Parisian concert scene for
1929 to 1930, and discovered that compared with 126 performances of
Beethoven, Liszt’s name appeared only thirty times, eleven for Les Préludes,
six for the Piano Concerto in E Major, and five for the Hungarian Fantasy.45
Early in the century, Peter Raabe distinguished himself as a conductor of the
symphonies and symphonic poems in his capacity as principal conductor in
Weimar between 1907 and 1920 and the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein
maintained a policy of performing larger works by Liszt until its temporary
cessation of activity in 1914 owing to the war.46 Unfortunately, some of
Liszt’s most effective works, namely the choral music and Lieder, did not
become standard repertoire in either concert or recorded venues.
Composition
The influence of a given composer upon composers of succeeding gener-
ations is perhaps the hardest to trace, for (when positive) it ranges from
direct quotation (most often in paraphrases or homages) to formal, motivic
and harmonic concepts or practices, in other words from the obvious to
the hidden. Of all composers of the early twentieth century to fall under
Liszt’s influence, Richard Strauss and Béla Bartók were arguably the most
significant and the most indebted to him. Even here, however, where they
seem most obvious, questions arise about the nature of transmission and
the extent of influence. On the one hand, Strauss readily acknowledged his
debt to Liszt’s aesthetics and music:47
I feel so completely at one with the symphonic poems, at least, and they
correspond to my nature so completely that I really believe that, without
ever having known the great master, I am capable of expressing the poetic
content of his works in a mode that at least ‘corresponds’ (according to
A[lexander] R[itter]). (1892)48
On the other, Strauss himself repeatedly attributed his knowledge of Liszt

to the mediation of mentor and Liszt pupil Alexander Ritter, in autobio-
graphical statements that scholars have attributed more to sentimentality
for a dear teacher than to documentation of an actual relationship.49
Whatever the actual nature of sources for Strauss’s devotion to Liszt,
which must be reinforced by Strauss’s own conducting activities – the
first performance was Héroı̈de funèbre at the annual festival of the Allge-
meiner Deutscher Musikverein in 188950 – there is no question that Strauss
fashioned himself as a latter-day Liszt (‘Liszt redivivus’). His activities as
Kapellmeister in Weimar (1889–92 and 1893–4) reveal parallels with Liszt’s
own roles in Weimar during the 1850s, including the ‘exemplary’ perfor-
mance of Wagner, promotion of music by promising contemporaries and
the general reform of musical life in the city.51 Later, when he had acquired
a position as a leading figure in German music, Strauss availed himself of a
broader platform for the reform of German musical life: in 1901, he success-
fully engineered his election to the presidency of the Allgemeiner Deutscher
Musikverein, the primary German society for the performance of new music,
founded by Liszt in 1861.52 During his term, Strauss established himself as
Liszt’s successor: he prominently featured Liszt’s larger compositions next
to new works above all by Gustav Mahler, supported the careers of younger
composers like Schoenberg and promoted the cause of his composer col-
leagues by advocating copyright reform. By doing so, Strauss not only drew
upon Liszt’s model, but also realised his specific Weimar-based plans for
advancing German music, which had led to the creation of the ADMV in
the first place.53
Despite significant differences in approaches to programmes, texture
and instrumentation, Strauss’s tone poems were regarded as carrying on
the ‘Musik als Ausdruck’ aesthetic as initiated by Liszt in his writings and
symphonic poems and codified by Friedrich von Hausegger in his 1885
book, Musik als Ausdruck. In contrast with Liszt’s symphonic poems that, in
their experimental qualities and inconsistent inspiration, remained largely
unknown and unperformed, however, the tone poems of Strauss almost
immediately entered the orchestral repertoire and came to represent one
face of musical modernity at the turn of the century. Strauss in turn served
as model for a number of composer-epigones, the most prominent of whom
in Germany belonged to the so-called Munich School of composers around
the year 1900, who in their dedication to the principle of programme music
saw themselves as maintaining the principles of the New-German School.54
Chief among them were Max von Schillings and Friedrich von Hausegger,
with such tone poems as Meergruß and Seemorgen (Schillings) and Bar-
barossa and Wieland der Schmied (Hausegger). Outside Germany, composers
wrote quite significant orchestral programme music in the first two decades
40 James Deaville
of the twentieth century, but their inspiration generally came directly from
Liszt rather than filtered through Strauss (see below).
Like Strauss, Bartók wrote and/or spoke about Liszt throughout his life,
although he was not as uncritically favourable.55 However, Bartók came to
know Liszt through a different set of circumstances: his early training was as
a pianist, and at that time it stood to reason that a Hungarian pianist would
study and perform Liszt.56 Moreover, as a student at the Academy of Music
in Budapest, Bartók was surrounded by the legacy of Liszt.57 Bartók’s son
reminisced in 1977 how his father ‘highly respected [Liszt] since his youth’.58
Indeed, Bartók’s performances of the Sonata in B Minor and the Spanish
Rhapsody before the age of 20, which earned critical acclaim, testify to his
early preoccupation with Liszt.59 Perhaps Bartók’s most noted comments
about Liszt appeared in print in the commemoration year 1911.60 There,
as in later articles and lectures, he tried to come to grips with the ‘Liszt
problem’, which he considered to be Liszt’s juxtaposition of the trivial or
hackneyed with the sublime or new (and the public’s inability to distinguish
the two caused its ongoing ‘rejection of him’).61 Bartók also had difficulties
with the unauthenticity of the Hungarian element in Liszt’s music and writ-
ings, yet refused to lay the blame at Liszt’s feet, but rather at his age’s lack
of knowledge of true Hungarian folk music. Whatever Liszt’s deficiencies,
Bartók’s public rhetoric recognised Liszt as a great composer and even main-
tained that ‘the compositions of Liszt exerted a greater fertilizing effect on
the next generation than those of Wagner’.62 In retrospect, in 1936, Bartók
could review those influences of Liszt and thereby identify Richard Strauss,
Busoni, Debussy and Ravel.63 In an interesting manifestation of the inter-
play between politics and the arts, the editors of Nyugat struck out the final
five sentences of Bartók’s article, in which he soundly criticised those who
appropriated the Hungarian Liszt for reactionary political policies: ‘they
have shown contempt throughout their professional lives for Liszt’s artistic
principles’.64
While Bartók disseminated Liszt’s legacy as performer and writer, he also
passed on Liszt’s compositional legacy in his own works. László Somfai has
argued that Bartók’s positive rhetoric about Liszt must be read according
to hidden motivations and thus we must be careful not to attribute too
much influence to Liszt,65 yet Somfai himself acknowledges that the Third
String Quartet has as a model Liszt’s B Minor Sonata, ‘one of the great
experiences of the young pianist-composer Bartók’.66 Early piano pieces
like the second Fantasia and the Scherzo draw heavily on Lisztian devices
like root progressions by thirds and motion ‘from a minor triad to the major
triad on its third’.67 Influences of Liszt can be found in other early works,
such as the piano Elegy, no. 1, op. 8b, Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra,
op. 1 and the Second Suite, but it is in the symphonic poem Kossuth of 1903
that the hand of Liszt is most evident, above all in the thematic transforma-
tion, which would remain an important structural principle for Bartók.
Regardless of the actual details of Bartók’s indebtedness to Liszt, he was
perceived as having carried Liszt’s musical legacy into the twentieth century,
creating a lineage that writers (especially Hungarians) would be fond of
evoking. However, Bartók’s recommendation from 1911 was prophetic, if
not setting the actual direction for performing, for the approach to Liszt,
whereby individuals were encouraged to sort out ‘good’ from ‘bad’ works in
creating a repertoire of Liszt for performing works or listening (and eventual
canonisation). The subjectivity of these personal interpretations is evident
from Bartók’s own enthusiasm for Totentanz, a work that would be easy to
dismiss on a superficial level for its flashy virtuosity. Such an approach con-
tributed to the problematic reception of Liszt during the twentieth century,
which more often than not dismissed the composer altogether as a mere
writer of second-rate piano music.
Of course, already by the turn of the century a Liszt tradition had estab-
lished itself in Hungary, not least through the naming of the Academy
of Music after him in 1925.68 Liszt had some influence upon Hungarian
composer-contemporaries such as Ferenc Erkel and Mihály Mosonyi, but
by the next generation, represented by Ernst von Dohnányi, Bartók and
Zoltán Kodály, the influence was inescapable. Although chiefly inspired by
Brahms, Dohnányi did employ the Hungarianisms that characterised the
works of Liszt, which can be seen in a work like the Second String Quartet.
As a result of their own ethnomusicological studies, both Bartók and Kodály
rejected Liszt’s concept and use of Hungarian national elements, preferring
to base their music upon authentic folk music. Nevertheless, Kodály received
significant inspiration from Liszt while a student at the Academy of Music
(1900–4), for during that time he became intimately familiar with Liszt’s
library.69 It is hard to hear a work like the Psalmus Hungaricus without think-
ing of Liszt’s large choral works like Psalm 13 or the Hungarian Coronation
Mass.
Hungarian composers born in the twentieth century experienced the
influence of Liszt in different ways from their predecessors. For example,
the symphonic or tone poem was no longer cultivated, at least not in the
manner of Liszt or Strauss; Liszt’s thematic Hungarianisms and Bartók’s or
Kodály’s quotations from Hungarian folk music were replaced by a more
subtle and integrated drawing upon folk material; and early twentieth-
century composers including Bartók had already explored the possibilities
of one-movement form pioneered by Liszt in his B Minor Sonata and arch
form as underlying symphonic poems like Les Préludes. In the works of the
post-war generation of György Kurtág and György Ligeti, we discover influ-
ences particularly (but not exclusively) from Liszt’s late piano compositions,
42 James Deaville
including symmetrical and other non-tonal harmonies, open form, and

octatonic scales.70 There exist as well clearer allusions to Liszt in the music
of Ligeti,71 primarily the second scene of his opera Le Grand Macabre, with its
‘twisted variants . . . of Liszt’s Grand Galop chromatique thrown in’.72 Also,
the Transcendental Etudes may have left their mark upon Ligeti’s second
book of études through their virtuosity, and Constantin Floros has con-
vincingly argued for Ligeti’s modelling of the pianistic technique of the
Piano Concerto on Liszt’s Années de pèlerinage and the Dante Sonata.73
However, not all of the musical elements enumerated above were the sole
property of Liszt, nor did his influence limit itself to Hungarian composers.
Still, the cultivation of Liszt in Hungary would have ensured a close famil-
iarity with it on the part of composers, who might add his stylistic elements
to their compositional palette. One way composers in the later twentieth
century could intentionally invoke Liszt and his music was through writing
an ‘Hommage à [Franz] Liszt’, which would prominently and unmistakably
draw upon thematic material or compositional techniques associated with
Liszt.74
Besides Busoni, other early twentieth-century German or Austrian com-
posers also profited from or valued some aspect(s) of Liszt’s oeuvre, but had
neither the level of enthusiasm nor the possibilities of dissemination that
Busoni did. Chief among these figures was Max Reger, who as church musi-
cian would play Liszt’s organ music, who shared with Liszt a common musi-
cal inspiration in Bach and who valued Liszt’s artistic credo.75 Hugo Wolf
also promoted Liszt, above all in his reviews, in which he notoriously ele-
vated Liszt’s symphonic poems above the symphonies of Brahms.76 Wolf’s
symphonic poem Penthesilea (1883–5) owes much to Liszt, but the songs
are clearly Wagnerian in nature.
At that same time, in the same German-speaking region of Europe,
we discover voices in opposition to Liszt, proving that he was a figure
about whom it was difficult to be neutral or silent. James Zychowicz has
effectively presented Gustav Mahler’s significant problems with Liszt, dis-
pelling myths about debts and borrowings (such as their settings of Goethe’s
‘Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis’, respectively in the Faust Sym-
phony and the Eighth Symphony).77 Mahler ‘was not particularly disposed
to Liszt’s music . . . and he disparaged the kind of program music that Liszt
composed’.78 Even though he did speak favourably about Die Legende von
der heiligen Elisabeth and conducted Les Préludes and other Liszt works in
New York City, there is no evidence Mahler promoted Liszt in either century.
The same applies to Arnold Schoenberg: although he admitted an influence
of Liszt in Verklärte Nacht 79 and the First String Quartet80 and clearly was
indebted to Liszt in the symphonic poem Pélleas und Mélisande, Schoen-
berg’s one major statement about his predecessor, in a jubilee assessment
from 1911,81 seriously took the celebratee to task. Like many of his con-
temporaries, Schoenberg could not get beyond Liszt as primarily a virtuoso
composer, and – like his modernist colleagues Loos and Kraus – believed
that ornamentation for its own sake was criminal. We must keep in mind,
of course, that Liszt’s late compositions were still unknown at the time.
During his lifetime, Liszt cultivated close ties to French and Russian
composers, which would become paths for his influence into the twentieth
century. Already in 1842, he made the acquaintance of the young César
Franck, who would remain under Liszt’s (and Wagner’s) influence, especially
in the area of organ music but also in his composition of symphonic poems.
Liszt’s relationship with Saint-Saëns was richer on a personal and musical
basis: they met several times, and Saint-Saëns emulated Liszt’s approaches to
the symphonic poem in his own orchestral works like Le Rouet d’Omphale,
Danse macabre and Phaéton.82 Vincent d’Indy spent eleven days in Weimar
in 1873, where he saw Liszt teach and received compositional advice, which
would translate into symphonic poems like Wallenstein (1873–1881) and
La Forêt enchantée (1878).
The greatest interest for Liszt’s influence upon French composers of the
twentieth century is the extent to which his music left a mark upon Debussy
and Ravel. Musicologists have been too quick and facile in assigning to Liszt
the position of ‘father of Impressionism’, who anticipated the style of those
two composers. Now that scholars have begun to pull apart the movement
labelled Impressionism and its two alleged exponents, we can recognise
Liszt’s differentiated role in their music, a position that Timbrell anticipated
in 1979. There can be little doubt that Liszt’s ‘modal effects, whole-tone har-
mony, pedalling and various coloristic devices greatly influenced Debussy’s
piano music’.83 Liszt researchers have frequently pointed to ‘Harmonies du
soir’ of the Transcendental Etudes and ‘Les Jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este’ of the
Années de pèlerinage: troisième année as antecedents to the piano sonorities
in Debussy. Yet Debussy did not favourably review the symphonic poem
Mazeppa, and otherwise did not write or speak in detail about Liszt, quite in
contrast with Ravel. Ravel studied and played Liszt’s virtuosic works, often
together with Riccardo Viñes,84 he was familiar with the symphonic works
(the Hungarian Rhapsodies supposedly served as inspiration for ‘Tzigane’)
and most significantly, Ravel’s keyboard style is heavily indebted to Liszt,
and not only in works like ‘Jeux d’eau’ and ‘Gaspard de la nuit’ (the latter
shows off the utmost technical skill of a pianist in the tradition of Liszt).
Still, as an important study of the French reception of Liszt in 1911 has
demonstrated, the French showed little interest in Liszt during the first
decades of the twentieth century, guided by the bias against his virtuoso
piano music.85 He was ‘barred from the Schola, hardly present in the
conservatory’,86 which – coupled with the dearth of performances of his
44 James Deaville
orchestral music – essentially kept Liszt out of the public’s and young per-
former’s eye.
Russia presented a different story in the early twentieth century, in part
owing to the extent of Liszt’s contacts with Russian composers and the
absence of a strong anti-virtuoso (and anti-German) aesthetic there. Also,
‘the opposition of Weimar versus Leipzig was of absolutely no consequence
for Russian music in the second half of the 19th century’.87 The list of
Russian composers whose work Liszt valued and supported encompasses
almost all of the noted figures of the nineteenth century: Glinka, Dargomizh-
sky, Balakirev, Borodin, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, Cui,
Glazunov and Liadov.88 The indebtedness of these Russian composers to
Liszt has been well documented89 – what is important here is how they
passed on Liszt in their teaching and their compositions. Sergei Liapunov
was actually a pupil of Klindworth, but he was so taken by Liszt that he
composed 12 Etudes d’exécution transcendante in emulation of the great vir-
tuoso. In the case of Sergei Rachmaninov, Liszt pupil Siloti was his cousin,
and Liszt works like the Concerto in E Major, the Hungarian Rhapsodies
and the Totentanz served as staples in his performing career. As pianist, he
then brought his predilection for Liszt to the New World, where he joined
other European émigrés like Paderewski (who also performed much Liszt).
His tremendous virtuosity has consistently evoked comparisons with Liszt,
as has his idiomatic writing for the keyboard – above all, the Rhapsody on a
Theme of Paganini (1934) is hard to imagine without the influence of Liszt’s
Totentanz.90
Three further leading Russian composers of the twentieth century admit-
ted their debt to or at least admiration of Liszt: Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri
Shostakovich and Igor Stravinsky. As piano student of Anna Essipoff and
composition student of Rimsky-Korsakov, Prokofiev could not help but
experience the influence of Liszt – in his memoirs, he confessed to especially
liking the concertos of Liszt,91 and traces of Liszt are indeed evident in his
own concertos. Shostakovich’s preferred performing repertoire during his
student days included Liszt, to the extent that he played Venezia e Napoli at
his graduation recital in 1923.92 He also planned in 1925 to compose a large
piano sonata modelled on the B Minor Sonata.93 Stravinsky studied with
Rimsky-Korsakov and grew up in the shadow of other composers who had
close ties to Liszt. In The Etude of January 1925, Stravinsky remarked how he
had ‘higher honor and admiration for the great Liszt whose immense talent
in composition is often underrated’94 – it would be interesting to subject
his ‘Russian’ ballets to analysis for Lisztian style elements.
Liszt’s symphonic legacy found resonance in other European ‘national
schools’ and North America. In Bohemia, Josef Suk carried on the tradition
of the symphonic poem as communicated from Liszt to Smetana. Sibelius
never had personal contact with Liszt, yet his teacher Wegelius was a Liszt
enthusiast – in 1894, he studied the Faust Symphony in detail and in the same
year acknowledged in a letter the following: ‘Really I am a tone painter and
poet. Liszt’s view of music is the one to which I am closest.’95 This attitude is
reflected in Sibelius’s symphonic poems from the 1890s, including Kullervo
and En Saga. Finally, in the United States, Liszt’s music filtered in in the
second half of the nineteenth century through performances of virtuosi like
Mason and von Bülow and the conducting activity of Theodore Thomas,
who championed the musical creations of the New German School through
performances by his touring orchestra.96 Charles Ives modelled his Second
Piano Sonata (‘Concord’) on the Sonata in B Minor and George Gershwin,
whose teacher Charles Hambitzer introduced him to Liszt, drew upon the
traditions and features of Liszt’s rhapsodies in his own Rhapsody in Blue.
In passing, it should be noted that Liszt’s music has served for a vari-
ety of twentieth-century ballet productions, including Constant Lambert’s
adaptation of Liszt called Dante Sonata (London, 1939, choreography by
Frederick Ashton), Darius Milhaud’s adaptation of Liszt in Beloved (New
York, 1941, choreography by Nijinska) and Hungarian Rhapsody (Rome,
1944, choreography by Miloss).
Scholarship
As already mentioned, the heterogeneity and ambiguity of Liszt himself
enabled the creation of a host of ‘Liszts’ in the hands of scholars in the late
nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. These ‘Liszts’, however, do cluster
themselves according to date and place, according to the cultural work
required of Liszt in a given society at a given time. Thus the following
discussion presents Liszt scholarship by nation or region, but within the
frame of a rough chronological ordering.
At the time of Liszt’s death his lasting legacy seemed to be assured
through the activities of scholars, for through the diligent work of two
pioneering women musicologists, Lina Ramann and Marie Lipsius (pen
name La Mara), an authoritative, large-scale biography was under way
(Ramann’s Franz Liszt als Künstler und Mensch, for which Liszt provided
information and which he considered to be his ‘official’ biography),97 and
his collected writings were already available in print.98 Only a few years
later, a large collection of his letters would appear under the editorship of
La Mara, who had already begun to collect these documents before his death.
All that was missing was a full thematic catalogue and a collected edition
of the musical works, which usually did not appear until considerably
after the death of a composer. That the biography is based upon Ramann’s
46 James Deaville
subjective interpretation of the sources and incorporates a number of fac-

tual errors, that the collected edition of the writings took liberties with the
original texts, that the letters edition omits passages without references and
misreads passages, can be expected from scholarly work of that era (see,
for example, Cosima Wagner’s editions of her husband’s letters or Friedrich
Niecks’s biography of Chopin).
Despite questions about their methodologies, however, Ramann’s edi-
tion of the collected writings remained in use until the 1980s and La Mara’s
edition of the letters continued to serve scholars throughout the twentieth
century. The reliance upon these older, partial ‘uncritical’ editions certainly
limited Liszt scholarship during the twentieth century, which in part engaged
in bringing the lacking documents to light, in part drew what could only
be considered provisional conclusions. At times, the lack of authoritative
editions led to false representations of Liszt, such as in National Socialist
propaganda, which believed the anti-Semitic statements in the second edi-
tion of Dès Bohémiens et leur musique en hongrie to have originated with
Liszt, when more recent scholarship has shown them to be the work of the
Princess zu Sayn-Wittgenstein.99 The lack of a definitive edition of the let-
ters became a leitmotive during the last two decades of the century, with
several announced attempts that never materialised – however, as more and
more of Liszt’s truly monumental correspondence was uncovered, the task
of a new edition became ever more daunting. It is to the credit of German
scholar Detlef Altenburg that he recognised and was able to answer the need
for a new edition of Liszt’s writings (see below).
Ramann’s Franz Liszt als Künstler und Mensch was important in its day,
especially as a repository of first-hand comments by and observations about
Liszt, and it established a tripartite division of his life that even Walker would
follow in its outlines. Liszt scholarship had only to wait forty years for a new
and improved ‘definitive’ biography, which not coincidentally was produced
by a German Liszt enthusiast and musicologist who enjoyed close ties with
Weimar. Peter Raabe, whose biography and source study would remain the
standard until the work of Alan Walker in the 1980s and 1990s, wrote a
dissertation about Liszt at a time when ‘serious’ musical scholars studied
the music of the distant past. Despite his full complicity with the National
Socialist agenda, Raabe merits recognition for his attempt to ‘show to others
the path to an understanding of one of the greatest men who ever lived’:100
as principal conductor in Weimar between 1907 and 1920 and custodian of
the Liszt Museum there from 1910 to his death in 1945, Raabe was able to
combine a performer’s experience of the music with a scholar’s knowledge of
the sources. Above all, his two-volume study Liszts Leben and Liszts Schaffen
from 1931 comprehensively engaged with primary sources for Liszt’s life and
work for the first time, both letters and composition manuscripts. Because
of its reliance on sources and ‘objective’, academic style, Raabe’s study was
able to strip away the Romantic accretions to Liszt. As a result, scholars had
a reasonable base upon which to build and the general public could obtain
a fairly reliable picture of the man and his music, arguably for the first time.
The unbroken history of a Liszt House/Museum in Weimar
(Hofgärtnerei) from shortly after his death (1887) contributed to making
that city a centre for Liszt research during the twentieth century.101 Liszt’s
letters and manuscripts from his last residence in Weimar were sent to the
Fürstin (Princess) Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein in Rome upon his death,
but after her passing on 8 March 1887, her daughter Fürstin Marie von
Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst gave the ‘Liszt-Nachlaß’ back to the principality
of Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach.102 To 1945, the Museum had four custodians:
Carl Gille (1887–1899), Carl Müllerhartung (1899–1902), Aloys Obrist
(1902–1910) and Peter Raabe (1910–1945). Further archival Liszt mate-
rials were purchased over the years, and partial bequests of colleagues and
researchers like Ramann, La Mara and Raabe were added to the collection.
By the end of the twentieth century, the archive would possess manuscripts
of over 470 works by Liszt and 6,000 letters to and from Liszt, making it
the world’s largest repository of primary sources by Liszt. As a result, much
archival research about Liszt throughout the twentieth century had con-
nections to the Nachlaß in Weimar. Not surprisingly, research by scholars
with close ties with Weimar like La Mara, Ramann, Raabe and Friedrich
Schnapp dominated the German scene in the first decades of the century.
In 1916, Raabe produced the first serious source study about Liszt, about
his orchestral music.103 At the same time, there was a real drive to gather
and publish Liszt’s correspondence, led by La Mara, who not only produced
eight volumes of letters from Liszt to various recipients (1893–1905, Breit-
kopf & Härtel),104 but also published important letters to Liszt (Briefe
hervorragender Zeitgenossen an Franz Liszt, 1895–1904) and individual vol-
umes of letters to his mother and others.105 The decades after Liszt’s death
also brought forth a myriad of Liszt reminiscences by colleagues, friends
and pupils who wished to record his words and document his practices as
teacher and performer:106 they include memoirs and documentations by
colleagues Ramann, Richard Pohl and A. W. Gottschalg and pupils Amy Fay,
Arthur Friedheim, August Göllerich, Alexander Siloti and August Stradal,
among many others.107 In fact, a case could be made for Liszt as the most
‘remembered’ figure of music history, in part because of his multi-faceted
life and activities.
These were the individuals from Liszt’s sphere of influence, whom Detlef
Altenburg has not inappropriately termed ‘hagiographers’.108 However, the
first decades of the twentieth century constituted actually a low point in
the popularity of Liszt in Europe and North America, with the scholarly
48 James Deaville
Lisztrezeption dominated by the view of him as a shallow composer of flashy

piano music. German musical scholarship coupled this scepticism of Liszt
with a passion for Wagner, whose music was a legitimate subject for study.109
Only as the full range of Liszt’s music became known could the prejudices
against him begin to fall away, and that only occurred gradually during
the course of the century, as more and more serious, far-seeing researchers
like Raabe and, later, Humphrey Searle, Dezsö Legány, Serge Gut and Alan
Walker (among many others) took up the cause of Liszt.
The 1930s were marked by an intensification of scholarly work about
Liszt, first and foremost in the wake of Peter Raabe’s study, already dis-
cussed above. One of its most important features is the catalogue of works,
which is a top-notch pioneering achievement of Peter Raabe and his son
Felix. Liszt himself had participated in the organisation of Breitkopf ’s 1855
Thematisches Verzeichniss der Werke [von] F. Liszt (revised as Thematisches
Verzeichnis der Werke, Bearbeitungen und Transkriptionen in 1877),110 but
Raabe gave the scholar known sources, cross-references and the like for all
identifiable works. His catalogue remained standard until Humphrey Searle
published a new index of compositions for the Liszt article in the New Grove
Dictionary of Music and Musicians of 1954, significantly revised by Sharon
Winklhofer for publication in 1985.111
1936, with its fifty-year commemoration of Liszt’s death, was a watershed
year for Liszt research, serving as the occasion for a variety of publications
throughout Europe. The later 1930s generally brought increased scholarly
interest in Liszt in German-speaking lands, as inspired by Raabe and in
the wake of the National Socialist appropriation of Liszt for their cultural
politics – not coincidentally, the initial emphasis was on genealogical
study, to establish the composer’s suitability for study and performance, as
German.112 At least partly in reaction to the German appropriation of Liszt,
Hungarian scholars undertook ‘magyarising’ Liszt studies of their own, in
order to claim him for their history and cultural legacy. Notable is Zoltán
Gárdonyi’s 1931 thesis and 1936 book about Hungarian stylistic elements in
Liszt’s music.113 Also, Hungarian scholarship brought out in 1936 arguably
the first comprehensive iconography of Liszt, Franz Liszt: Ein Künstlerleben
in Wort und Bild, edited by Werner Füssmann and Béla Mátéka (despite the
German title and collaborator, the illustrations were so directed towards
‘Magyarentum’ that the Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Pro-
paganda forbade the Berlin press to review the book).114 From the 1930s
onward, Hungarian scholars came to occupy an increasingly significant
role in Liszt research, overtaking the Germans in the post-war years and,
indeed, becoming pre-eminent in all aspects of work with Liszt, from the
New Liszt Edition and the thematic catalogue to biographical and source
studies.
Beginning in the 1920s, French writers took an active role in advancing

Liszt, especially with regard to his years in France. After general biographies
of Liszt by Jean Chantavoine (1920) and Guy de Pourtalès (1927), which
found broad dissemination, Liszt’s letters to Countess Marie d’Agoult and to
his children appeared in print respectively in 1933–4 and 1936, as edited by
his grandson Daniel Ollivier.115 Robert Bory made images of Liszt and
his haunts available in the same Liszt year (1936) as the aforementioned
iconographical collection of Füssmann and Mátéka. A Hungarian expatri-
ate working in Paris, Emile Haraszti, on the one hand published valuable
documents about Liszt’s years in Paris,116 on the other dropped a ‘bomb-
shell’ (to quote Michael Saffle),117 in an attempt to take some of the shine
from Liszt’s halo: he asserted that none of Liszt’s literary works were gen-
uine, because of their collaborative origins and the lack of autographs.118
More recent research by Mária Eckhardt and above all Detlef Altenburg has
proven those assertions to be false (see below), yet Haraszti’s debunking of
Liszt as author unfortunately discouraged scholars from dealing with the
issue for over forty years.
After the war, the topography of Europe changed, through the formation
of the Iron Curtain. The most important sites for Liszt research – Weimar
and Budapest – were now located within the East Bloc, which in a way con-
firmed Liszt’s own special sphere of influence within Eastern Europe and
Russia. Granted his personal attachment to the region and his advocacy of
French socialist thought, Liszt was well suited to play a major role in the
cultural politics of the socialist countries.119 Nowhere is this development
more evident than in Germany, where the German Democratic Republic –
for example – hosted in 1961 the principal German commemoration of
Liszt’s 150th birthday (in Weimar), collaborated with the People’s Repub-
lic of Hungary on the Liszt works edition during the 1960s and staged a
series of Liszt competitions and awarded Liszt prizes for young performers
throughout its existence.120 In contrast, in the Federal Republic of Ger-
many, where Liszt stood in the shadow of Wagner (and even the Second
Viennese School) and was not part of the post-war cultural politics, ‘the
interest in the music of Franz Liszt was not . . . particularly large . . . not only
for musical life in general . . . but also for scholarly work with Liszt’.121 The
West German scholar of the 1960s who did show interest in Liszt was Carl
Dahlhaus, whose forward-thinking writings focused on Liszt’s symphonic
works and how they reveal formal and harmonic innovations in anticipation
of twentieth-century discoveries. Following his lead, the next generation of
scholars in the FRG, such as Detlef Altenburg, Norbert Miller and Dieter
Torkewitz, produced Liszt studies in the 1970s that explored the aesthetics
and theory behind specific genres and periods of his music.122 This makes for
an illuminating comparison with Liszt scholarship of the GDR, where
50 James Deaville
the primary interests seemed to reside in publishing primary documents

and music and producing broad assessments of his life and works: this
applies to such individuals as Werner Felix, Hans-Rudolf Jung and Wol-
fram Huschke.123 Combined with the active promotion of Liszt through
performances, competitions and festivals, we could speculate that Liszt and
his music played more significant roles in East Germany and, by extension,
the socialist countries of Central Europe than in West Germany and the
other countries of Western Europe, although – as for other composers – it
is very difficult to determine how his influence filtered down to the broad
public.
The post-war years brought a special efflorescence of Liszt studies in
Hungary, overwhelmingly by a young generation of scholars (Gárdonyi was
the only scholar from the 1930s who remained active after the war). One
tangible marker of this interest in Liszt was the large international ‘Liszt–
Bartók’ congress held in Budapest in 1961, which featured papers by Liszt
scholars from all countries (although primarily from Hungary).124 Land-
mark Hungarian scholarly achievements from after 1945 (into the 1970s)
include Bence Szabolcsi’s study of Liszt’s late life and works (1955), István
Szelenyi’s analytical and historical investigation of Liszt’s harmonic innova-
tions (1961), László Somfai’s source-critical study of the Faust Symphony
(1961), Margit Prahács’s edition of Liszt letters from Hungarian collections
(1966), Klára Hamburger’s popular biography of Liszt (1966), and Dezsö
Legány’s documentary history of Liszt’s sojourns in Hungary (1976).125 In
tandem with this scholarly work, the Hungarians mounted Liszt festivals and
an international piano competition, among many other practical activities
to promote and preserve his legacy.
If in France we can only identify one scholar significantly contributing to
Liszt research between 1945 and 1980 – composer-musicologist Serge Gut,
with his 1975 study of Liszt’s compositional style –126 the same cannot be
said for Great Britain, which produced writers who throughout the twenti-
eth century showed an interest in Liszt. Music critic Ernest Newman, who
during the 1930s would attempt to denounce Liszt as a fraud, wrote in 1900
that ‘[Liszt] brought into music, to a degree unparalleled by any previous
musician, the vitalized experience of an unendingly active life’.127 Newman
did not possess training as a musicologist, nor did later British writers on
Liszt, whose contributions bore the marks of their training and profession:
Sacheverell Sitwell was an art critic and poet, Humphrey Searle was first and
foremost a composer and even Alan Walker received early training as pianist
and analyst. Sitwell produced a well-written but ill-informed biography Liszt
of 1934,128 whereas Searle’s Liszt publications profited from his analytical
skills. Searle was responsible both for the authoritative Liszt works list in
the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1954), which revises and
corrects Raabe,129 and for the quite perceptive one-volume survey of Liszt’s
compositions, The Music of Liszt (1954), which appeared in a revised edition
in 1966. In 1970, Alan Walker expanded upon Searle’s overview of Liszt’s
oeuvre by publishing a valuable collection of essays about his life and works,
by British scholars and performers.130 And in the United States, Michael
Saffle produced what was the first American study of Liszt sources (and
arguably the first detailed American study of Liszt in general).131 We shall
return to Walker and Saffle when discussing most recent Liszt scholarship.
Although the exponential growth of Liszt scholarship can be traced back
to the 1960s or even the 1950s, there seems to have been a turning point
in the late 1970s, as revealed by two developments: the birth of three peri-
odicals devoted to Liszt and the first of a series of scholarly conferences
dedicated to Liszt that would result in publications in important series.
One of the Liszt-related developments of the late twentieth century was the
emergence of national and international organisations devoted to the cul-
tivation of Liszt and his music, often populated by amateur musicians and
Liszt enthusiasts. With their emphasis on performance, such organisations
as the American Liszt Society (founded in 1964) and the British Liszt Soci-
ety (founded in 1951) contributed to popularising Liszt, at times, however,
at the cost of scholarly substance. Noted exceptions are the Liszt Ferenc
Társaság Szeksárdi csoportja in Budapest, founded in 1893, and the Franz-
Liszt-Gesellschaft e.V. Weimar, established in 1990, both of which sponsor
or support conferences, performances and publications. Of the various Liszt
society publications, the Journal of the American Liszt Society (established in
1977 by Maurice Hinson and edited by Michael Saffle from 1987 to 1991)
attained the highest level of scholarship, although the British Liszt Society
Journal (founded in 1975 by Adrian Williams and Derek Watson) and Liszt
Saeculum of the International Liszt Centre (1978–2001)132 did reprint valu-
able articles. The latest Liszt periodical publication, the Quaderni of the
Istituto Liszt in Bologna (since 1998), seeks to maintain a high scholarly
standard in publishing research about Liszt.
Independent of the formation of Liszt societies and their publications
was the establishment of Liszt research centres in diverse European coun-
tries during the 1970s and 1980s. The locations and raisons d’être of the
centres are most varied, but usually they were the creations of dedicated
Liszt researchers in countries where Liszt was active and sometimes they are
attached to libraries, collections or museums, whether the European Liszt
Centre in Eisenstadt (Emmerich Horvath and the Burgenländische Lan-
desbibliothek), the Liszt Ferenc Memorial Museum and Research Centre
in Budapest (Mária Eckhardt), the International Liszt Centre for 19th Cen-
tury Music (Lennart Rabes), the Franz-Liszt-Forschungsstelle in Regensburg
(Detlef Altenburg) or the Istituto Liszt in Bologna (Rossana Dalmonte).133
52 James Deaville
What is important is that these centres were able to receive national and inter-
national recognition and support in order to mount exhibitions and con-
ferences and to publish a journal, a monograph series, music or conference
reports. Some of the most valuable recent scholarship about Liszt, by leading
Liszt specialists, has appeared in four publication series that make available
papers from topical conferences of the past twenty-five years: Liszt-Studien
I–IV (vol. I: Kongreß-Bericht Eisenstadt 1975, 1977; vol. II: Referate des 2.
Europäischen Liszt-Symposions . . . , 1981; vol. III: Franz Liszt und Richard
Wagner . . . , 1986; vol. IV: Der junge Liszt . . . , 1993), Wissenschaftliche
Arbeiten aus dem Burgenland (among others, vol. 78: Liszt heute, 1987;
vol. 87: Die Projekte der Liszt-Forschung, 1991; vol. 93: Liszt und die Nation-
alitäten, 1996), the Franz Liszt Studies Series of Pendragon Press (among
others, vol. V: Liszt and His World, 1998; vol. VI: New Light on Liszt and His
Music, 1997); and Weimarer Liszt-Studien (vol. I: Liszt und die Weimarer
Klassik, 1997).
This apparent wealth of scholarly resources should quell any complaints
about a dearth of Liszt research. Yet the very plethora of these societies
and research centres lends an apologetic air to them – certainly no other
composer has such an extensive infrastructure of latter-day support. The
fragmentation of Liszt scholarship into disparate national ‘schools’ through
diverse societies and independent research centres may well have hindered
the development of a collectivity that would facilitate the undertaking of
large-scale international Liszt projects like a new edition of the letters or a
comprehensive discography or iconography.
At the same time, the geometrically increasing serious scholarly work
on Liszt since the 1970s contributed to making him a respectable subject
for research – it was no longer necessary to apologise for writing a disserta-
tion about Liszt. This legitimation of Liszt within musical scholarship was
the product of intense, perspicacious efforts by Liszt researchers in Europe
and North America, often attached to large or important projects (col-
lected writings, thematic catalogue, definitive biography). The centennial
year 1986 was a milestone in that regard, not only calling forth a host of
scholarly conferences, but also marking important initiatives like the estab-
lishment of the Liszt Research Centre in Budapest and the beginnings of the
Sämtliche Schriften.
Detlef Altenburg became the leading German Liszt specialist, above all
through his establishment of research centres in Regensburg and Weimar, his
founding of the Franz-Liszt-Gesellschaft e.V. Weimar (1990), his editing of
the Weimarer Liszt-Studien (Laaber) and his creation and editing of the new
critical edition of the Sämtliche Schriften, one of the major scholarly projects
of the late twentieth century.134 Altenburg has encouraged the work of
younger Liszt scholars, including Dorothea Redepenning (Liszt and Russia)
and Rainer Kleinertz (Liszt’s French-era writings), and has involved non-
German Liszt specialists in projects like the edition of writings (Serge Gut
and Klára Hamburger). Beyond editing books, Austrian Gerhard Winkler
has published insightful articles about sources and about aesthetic questions
surrounding Liszt’s music.135
In Hungary, the last quarter of the century saw the substantial and impor-
tant contributions of Mária Eckhardt, Director of the Liszt Ferenc Memorial
Museum and Research Centre in Budapest, to the Liszt cause. She has pub-
lished valuable reference tools and studies about all aspects of Liszt’s life
and work, but especially relating to Liszt and Hungary136 – most notably,
Eckhardt (with American Rena Mueller) published the works list for the
revised version of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and is
co-editor of the Liszt thematic catalogue.137 As Director of the museum and
research centre, she mounted exhibitions and hosted conferences, notably
‘Franz Liszt and Advanced Musical Education in Europe’ on the occasion of
the 125th anniversary of the Budapest Academy of Music (2000).138 Other
Hungarian Liszt scholars active before 1980 remained productive authors
and editors, including Legány and Hamburger.139
The revival of popular interest in Liszt must be attributed to the efforts of
a British researcher and Liszt enthusiast, Alan Walker, and in particular, his
three-volume biography of Liszt (1983–96).140 Written in a style accessible
to the general public as well as the scholar, this study of Liszt was the largest
and most factually accurate to date, drawing on many unpublished sources.
Walker’s support of Liszt festivals and societies and publication in news-
papers and keyboard magazines has also brought Liszt scholarship to the
public, as have his other monographs on the subject.141 British–Canadian
scholar Pauline Pocknell has produced notable documentary studies on a
variety of Liszt topics, and has set a particularly high standard in her edi-
tion of the Liszt-Agnès Klindworth correspondence.142 British author Derek
Watson published a useful one-volume biography,143 and Adrian Williams
edited two volumes of Liszt documents in English translation.144 As men-
tioned under ‘Performance’, Kenneth Hamilton and Leslie Howard are in
many ways unique among Lisztians, for their activities combine successful
careers as Liszt performers with solid scholarship about his music.145
It is hard to point to important Liszt scholars in the United States before
the 1970s, despite the activity of the American Liszt Society. First and fore-
most is the multifarious Liszt activity of Michael Saffle, who since his disser-
tation in 1977 published on such Liszt topics as bibliography, manuscript
sources and journalistic reception, edited the Journal of the American Liszt
Society and edited the Franz Liszt Studies Series for Pendragon Press. Espe-
cially noteworthy are the annotated Liszt bibliography, Franz Liszt: A Guide
to Research (1991 – revised edition 2003), and the collection and analysis
54 James Deaville
of press reports about Liszt’s German tours, Liszt in Germany 1840–1845

(1994).146 Saffle also hosted conferences and generally encouraged the work
of younger scholars in the field. Charles Suttoni left his mark on Liszt schol-
arship through his bibliographies of Liszt correspondence, which extend
from 1979 through 1999.147 Rena Mueller has published several articles
about Liszt sources and is co-editor of the Liszt thematic catalogues, both
for the second edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
and as separate publication (under contract with Henle).148 Finally, it
needs to be mentioned that at the turn of the century, leading figures in
North American musicology – for example Richard Leppert and Lawrence
Kramer – turned to Liszt in their scholarly publishing, albeit focused on
the topic of his virtuosity.149 Other North American scholars who have
approached Liszt’s virtuosity from the perspective of cultural studies are
Susan Bernstein, Paul Metzner and the author of this chapter.150
Finally, although neither France nor Italy has brought forth large num-
bers of Liszt researchers in recent years, the work of two scholars merits
special mention here. The Liszt work of both Serge Gut and Rossana Dal-
monte has strong analytical foundations and national tendencies. After his
ground-breaking dissertation of 1975, Gut edited a variety of conference
reports and wrote extensively about Liszt and the French-speaking world,
but most importantly, he authored the standard French-language biography
of Liszt, co-edited the composer’s early writings and edited the correspon-
dence of Liszt and Marie d’Agoult.151 Besides her aforementioned activities
as director of the Istituto Liszt in Bologna and editor of the Quaderni, Dal-
monte has undertaken over the last two decades above all a series of semiotic
investigations of Liszt’s work.152
Despite the work of all of these scholars, the twentieth century did not
advance the cause of Liszt in a number of specific areas, which has had a dele-
terious effect upon further research. Above all, the failure of Liszt scholarship
to undertake an edition of the collected letters not only caused researchers to
continue to rely upon old, often inaccurate, editions, but also precluded
the salutary effects of participation in such a publication for young schol-
ars (and resultant spin-off theses and articles). The lack of a discography
and iconography may not have had such an effect, but the absence of a
definitive thematic catalogue, collected edition of the writings and com-
plete edition of the music until late in the century (and carrying over into
the twenty-first century) has kept scholarship from a more intense and con-
sistent engagement with Liszt’s music and thought. There is very little work
on the sacred and choral music and the Lieder, for example. At the same time,
the effort devoted to the issue of national identity probably had more of a
fragmenting effect upon Liszt scholarship. Thus the cynical observer might
speculate that Liszt scholarship was not much further advanced at the end
of the twentieth century than it was at the beginning, and in fact possibly
behind, since in 1900 his memory was still fresh among the public and musi-
cians, and there existed a recent ‘definitive’ biography (Ramann), ‘reliable’
editions of letters and the literary works and plans for a critical edition of
the music. Still, during the course of the twentieth century, scholarship has
significantly advanced our understanding of the man and, to a lesser extent,
his music and times.
Liszt in film
An essay about Liszt in the twentieth century cannot close without reference
to his role in film, that quintessentially ‘modern’ artistic genre. As John
Tibbetts has remarked, ‘the man who threw his lance into the future will
surely be a cinematic spokesperson for a New Age’.153 Liszt’s life and career
were so colourful, so fascinating, the subject of so many popular legends,
that he ranks among the most ‘filmed’ composers. Tibbetts identifies nine
films since 1943 in which Liszt played an important role, more than just a
cameo appearance – it is quite likely that more filmic representations of Liszt
exist, for he limited his observations to Hollywood films, from the ‘biopic’
era and later. As might be expected, there are as many ‘Liszts’ as there are
films, depending on the director’s and actor’s visions. For example, in A
Song to Remember (1943), we find a generous and supportive Liszt vis-à-
vis the struggling Chopin, whereas the Liszt of Song of Love (1947), about
Clara Schumann, is supercilious. Song Without End (1960) is a traditional
biopic about Liszt himself, who is played rather blandly by Dirk Bogarde
(this portrayal is of a Liszt pure and unblemished).
At this point it is important to remember that except for documentaries,
the genre of film is not about biographical accuracy but rather telling a story –
or not telling a story, in the case of Lisztomania (1975). That brilliant satire
by Ken Russell was roundly criticised by Liszt enthusiasts in the American
and British Liszt Societies, yet the heterogeneous mélange of scenes actually
reveals a deep understanding of Liszt’s personal conflicts, and by portraying
the virtuoso through Roger Daltrey, former lead singer of The Who, Rus-
sell draws a fascinating bridge between nineteenth- and twentieth-century
society. The farcical Impromptu (1990) also takes great liberties with ‘his-
torical truth’ in its portrayal of Liszt, but it well captures the conviviality,
superficiality and emotional parasitism that reigned in the salon culture of
the early nineteenth century.
Needless to say, these films about Liszt utilise his music in their sound-
tracks. However, over seventy other movies from the twentieth century have
soundtracks that quote from Liszt, including The Black Cat (1934), Captain
56 James Deaville
Blood (1935), One Hundred Men and a Girl (1937), Flash Gordon Conquers
the Universe (1940), All About Eve (1950), Interlude (1957), Karl May (1970),
Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988), Shine (1996), Eyes Wide Shut (1999) and
Hamlet (2000). Even before sound films, it is quite likely that theatre musi-
cians would have played appropriate and known excerpts from Liszt, such
as the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 or Les Préludes or Liebestraum No. 3.
Through his presence in film, Liszt arguably reached a larger audience in
the twentieth century than he did through concert performances.
Conclusion
Perhaps most importantly, Liszt has not yet achieved canonicity in the worlds
of performance and recording, which is so important to maintaining a last-
ing presence that is not subject to the changing tastes of audiences, scholars
or performers and that does not require periodic revival or herculean efforts
to keep alive. Unlike Richard Strauss, whose tone poems (up to Also sprach
Zarathustra) belong to the repertories of all major orchestras, the only sym-
phonic poem by Liszt played with any regularity at the end of the twentieth
century was Les Préludes. When we turn to the piano, we find that Liszt has
much better held his own, especially with the two concertos and the Hun-
garian Rhapsodies, which are in the repertory of most concert pianists. And
then we must add the Transcendental Etudes and the Sonata in B Minor, to
comprise a ‘virtuosic canon’ for Liszt. However, that leaves large portions of
his oeuvre unperformed on a regular basis, including the piano transcrip-
tions, the sacred music, the secular choral works, the organ music and the
Lieder, some of which count among his most beautiful and inspired music.
In the 125 years since his death, Liszt has had to withstand a withering
attack upon his person and his music, based on misinformation and bias.
That he was enigmatic as a person and often unorthodox and innovative as
a composer could only contribute to the ‘problem of Liszt’. However, given
the ever-growing interest in Liszt on the part of scholars, performers and
audiences, there is good reason to hope that the twenty-first century will
make right past injustices and position Liszt among the leading figures of
musical history. After all, Liszt himself said, ‘I can wait.’
4 Liszt’s early and Weimar piano works
ke n n e t h h a m i lto n
Liszt’s piano works have always rightly been regarded as his greatest musical
monument. Even those who find his general style inimical have acknowl-
edged that his technical imagination as a writer of piano music and his
command of keyboard colour were unsurpassed. Brahms, otherwise an
inveterate hater of Liszt’s music, found in his operatic fantasies the ‘classi-
cism of keyboard technique’,1 but the mastery of his original music, often
denigrated by his contemporaries, is now routinely acknowledged. To be
sure, Liszt could be justly charged with his own criticism of Schubert: ‘he
was too immoderately productive, wrote incessantly, mingling what was
trivial with what was important, what was great with what was mediocre,
paying no heed to criticism and allowing his wings free flight’.2 The com-
poser who in 1856 completed his remarkable Dante Symphony, but the
same year served up the pompously banal Festvorspiel, was perhaps more
than usually subject to the vagaries of inspiration, but a century after his
death Liszt’s core masterpieces remained firmly fixed in the standard concert
repertoire, and many other lesser-known works would reward more regular
exposure today.
The following discussion is necessarily somewhat selective owing to the
sheer size of Liszt’s output. It proceeds largely chronologically, but does
not always adopt the routine division between ‘transcription’ and ‘original’
works. Although such a distinction may be easy and useful to sustain for
some music – the Beethoven Symphony arrangements are obviously ‘tran-
scriptions’ and the Ballade in B Minor obviously an ‘original’ work – many
of Liszt’s pieces, such as the Don Juan Fantasia (1841) or A la chapelle Six-
tine (1862), occupy a nebulous area in between, and contain far too much
original creative thinking to be fairly categorised merely as transcriptions.
This opinion was shared by Schumann, who even believed that one of Liszt’s
most faithful transcriptions – of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique – had been
carried out with such imagination that it could be reasonably described as
an original work (see p. 63 below). These problems of categorisation have
bedevilled Liszt reception, and caused the composer himself to remark wryly
that everyone knew he had no talent for original composition, but had some
skill as an arranger. In 1850 his amanuensis Joachim Raff, after studying the
[57]
58 Kenneth Hamilton
magisterial Fantasia and Fugue for Organ on ‘Ad nos, ad salutarem undam’
from Meyerbeer’s Le Prophète, addressed the issue:
I have gone through the Prophete Fugue with great interest. You know, it is a
mystery to me how you can take such pains over the arrangement of a
theme such as this? With the same expenditure of invention you could easily
have produced an original composition of the highest significance and one
would never again have to hear it said that you have to fasten on to
Meyerbeer because of a lack of original invention. I know what you will
answer: ‘This is my wish’.3
Raff’s description of this work as an ‘arrangement’ is glaringly unjust (its

twenty-minute span is based on only sixteen bars of Meyerbeer) but his
anticipation of the dismissive attitude of some music critics proved to be
accurate. There is no reason to reinforce this here.
Juvenilia
Liszt’s very first published piano composition was a curiosity – a varia-
tion on the waltz by the publisher Diabelli that so stimulated Beethoven’s
imagination. Diabelli had requested one variation each from composers
then resident in Vienna. Beethoven, by far the most celebrated, had at first
contemptuously refused, but ended up producing thirty-three. The other
composers complied with better grace, if less inspiration, and fifty result-
ing variations were published in 1822. Only Liszt and Schubert stand out
among the catalogue of forgotten figures in this portmanteau collection, in
the former’s case more for his later fame than for the cliched crossed-hand
figuration with which the 11-year-old bedecked the well-worn harmonies
of Diabelli’s theme. Liszt’s official opus 1, however, was the more ambitious
Eight Variations on an Original Theme in A Major, written in 1824. The
theme is attractive enough, if hardly arresting, the variations competent, if
commonplace. Remarkably, this slender theme, and passages from the pro-
lix Allegro di Bravura and Rondo di Bravura written the same year, turn up
in the posthumously published ‘Third’ Piano Concerto in E Major, com-
posed in 1839. Perhaps a paternal fondness for his earliest music prompted
Liszt’s re-use of this material, for it can hardly be said that any of these
technically tricky, but empty and rambling works present much of interest.
Slightly more notable are the contemporaneous Seven Brilliant Variations
on a Theme of Rossini (on ‘Ah! Come nascondere la fiamma vorace’ from
Ermione), which have at least the benefit of relative concision, and show
the novice composer experimenting in the introduction with certain rudi-
mentary orchestral-style effects, as well as a precocious fondness for the
59 Early and Weimar piano works
grand gesture. A similar type of opening is found in the 1824 Impromptu

on Themes of Rossini and Spontini, the first few bars of which reappeared
in more mature guise as the initial flourish of the Transcendental Study
‘Eroica’.
The Impromptu obviously had its origins in the improvised concert-
fantasias with which notably even the young Liszt delighted his audiences,
but is unexpectedly structured in a modified sonata form, with two Rossini
themes forming the exposition and recapitulation, and two Spontini themes
appearing where we might expect the development to occur. This and the
Allegro di Bravura were Liszt’s first published sonata forms. He had already
written three solo piano sonatas in 1825 as a lad of fourteen, and one was
composed soon after for piano duet.4 All are now lost. In old age Liszt was
asked about them by his biographer Lina Ramann, and in a moment of
nostalgia copied down the opening of one in F minor. This evidently began
with the same harmonic progression as Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ Sonata,
but the surviving music shows no more sign of profundity than the rest of
his juvenile output. Liszt made a note of the first three bars of another of
the sonatas, in C minor, in a letter to his mother of 1836, in which he asked
her to send him all his early piano music.5 These three bars tell us nothing
about the work, except that its loss is unlikely to trouble future generations.
The fact that his 1820s sonatas had remained in manuscript while sets of
meretricious variations appeared in print shows that originally Liszt’s (or
perhaps more accurately, his father’s) main purpose in publishing his music
had been the promotion of his concert career. Although a glance is enough
to show that a child capable of producing this must have had an exceptional
keyboard facility, Liszt was hardly as precocious as Mozart or Mendelssohn
in his compositional development. Fluent as it might be, it always prompts
the qualification ‘for someone of that age’.
The only record we have of a performance of one of the ‘serious’ solo
pieces – an unspecified sonata – is from a concert in Bordeaux in 1826. With
hardened cynicism beyond his years, Liszt apparently told the audience that
the work was by Beethoven, and laughed inwardly as his listeners fell into
raptures over its sublime merits. The little Scherzo in G Minor from 1827,
compact and acerbic, has a hint of this sort of mischievous humour, but it
was the Etude [sic] en douze exercices dans tous les tons majeurs et mineurs
(1826) that would be most significant for Liszt’s future development. Only
twelve of these ‘exercises’ were completed and published, though the title
implies a set of twenty-four. (The manuscript of an unfinished piece in F
major – possibly intended as the next in the set – was sold at an auction some
years ago.) They are modest studies in the style of Liszt’s teacher Czerny,
and in themselves devoid of anything in the way of particular interest, apart
from the suave Italianate cantilena of the A major piece. Their importance,
60 Kenneth Hamilton
however, lies in the fact that they form the basis of Douze Grandes Etudes of
1837–8, later revised as Etudes d’exécution transcendante.
Liszt himself could hardly have harboured many illusions about the
quality of his first compositional efforts, and it is significant that he never
sought to publish the concerto in E major fashioned out of some of his 1824
pieces, although it is perhaps surprising that he chose to write it all with
this source material. In the late 1830s he was obviously going through his
early compositions to see what could be salvaged and reworked. Schumann
suggested (in his review of the Grandes Etudes) that this was to demonstrate
to a sceptical public how far he had progressed as a composer, but other
reasons also present themselves, including genuine affection for the music
and artistic thrift. Liszt’s imagination often seemed to need a specific pre-
existing musical stimulus (however trivial) to work from, and this could
include his own early pieces as well as the works of others. In this respect his
customary concert improvisations on given themes seem to have informed
his other creative activities.
Approaching maturity
In 1829 Liszt completed the Grand fantaisie sur la tyrolienne de l’opéra ‘La
fiancée’ d’Auber, his most accomplished keyboard work to date, and one in
which he mastered and in places surpassed the brilliant display figuration of
his Parisian virtuoso contemporaries. To be sure, taken at face value this set
of variations is not without one fundamental problem. After a long, ornate
and sometimes pompous introduction (a commonplace at the time), the
eventual arrival of the tune has an almost comically deflationary effect to
modern ears, prompting smiles like the jokingly portentous introduction
that prefaces the theme in Dohnányi’s Variations on a Nursery Tune. The
trivial little Auber melody ‘Montagnard ou Berger, votre sort peux changer’ –
however well-known and loved in the Paris of the opera’s premiere – is
of such staggering banality that the energetically acrobatic variations that
follow seem like a musical illustration of ‘much ado about nothing’.
Liszt continued to play this piece in his concerts for fifteen years, and
published two revised editions, including a considerably shortened version,
but the ridiculously over-the-top impression of certain passages remains.
Indeed, Liszt may have been not only aware of this, but have intended it. In
much later life he claimed ‘For Auber, who was once very fashionable, I have
and had no taste.’6 His friend and first biographer d’Ortigue (working very
probably from information supplied by the composer himself) described the
fantasy in 1835 as a ‘mocking piece with Byronic energy, the figures of which
have a coquettish brilliance, after the manner of Monsieur Herz’, adding that
in it ‘Liszt had summed up the state of his soul at that time.’7 One does not
have to look far into Liszt’s biography to see that the then ‘state of his soul’
was one of adolescent despondency, characterised in typically Romantic
fashion by a thwarted first love-affair (with Caroline de Saint-Cricq) and
an obsession with death. Was the ‘mocking’ aspect of the fantasy simply a
later re-evaluation by Liszt of a piece he had begun to find embarrassingly
superficial ‘after the manner of M. Herz’, or did it originally represent a
sneer thrown at the tastes of the Parisian musical public by means of the
very virtuosity they were applauding? Perhaps Liszt too smiled sarcastically
as the trite tyrolienne made its appearance, heralded by a cascade of chords
and octaves. As early as 1826 he had performed some variations by Herz
himself in Marseilles and, according to an eye-witness, ‘made great fun of
those who applauded. “Oh, how beautiful it is, but difficult too. Il y a des sauts
[leaps],des sauts”, someone remarked.“Say, rather, des sottises [stupidities]”,
replied the child.’8 Perhaps not much had changed when ten years later he
wrote of one of his concerts ‘the piece by Weber (the Konzertstück) was not
understood. La fiancée accorded better with their retarded sensibilities.’9
The brooding discontent of the young Liszt was made radically more
manifest in 1833, when his next piano piece was written, the Harmonies
poétiques et religieuses, a remarkable leap into an inward realm of feeling far
from the world of Monsieur Herz. Inspired by Lamartine’s set of poems of
the same name, the score prints the poet’s own preface as an introduction,
its talk of solitude, meditation, contemplation and prayer closely reflected in
the music, and the last distilled into a consoling Andante religioso towards the
end of the piece. For the rest, Liszt’s Harmonies is astonishingly avant-garde –
improvisatory, amorphous and unsettled, often dispensing with both key
and time signature in a continuous development of the dragging, morose
three-note idea heard at the outset. The ending is deliberately inconclusive,
the music left hanging in the air in a manner that would no doubt have baffled
contemporary concert audiences, and sometimes causes surprise today. Liszt
had intended this to be the first of a group of pieces based on Lamartine’s
Harmonies, but the idea was not realised until the mid-1840s, when a cycle
with the same title was assembled. The original Harmonies poétiques et
religieuses, now dubbed by Liszt ‘tronquée et fautive’, was reworked and
retitled Pensée des morts, a clue also to the fundamental preoccupations of
the earlier version.
The same improvisatory, stream-of-consciousness approach to compo-
sition is found in the three Apparitions of the next year, which in some
respects seem to look forward to the fragmentary, aphoristic pieces of Liszt’s
late style. The third of these is a feverish fantasy on Schubert’s Waltz, op. 9,
62 Kenneth Hamilton
no. 33, later treated with more restraint in the fourth Soirée de Vienne of
1852. Though the second piece seems too much like an insubstantial sketch
to be entirely satisfying, the first is a minor masterpiece, novel alike in the
almost continuously recitative-like nature of its melodic material, its pro-
tean enharmonic changes and its imaginative keyboard setting (the unusu-
ally dissonant and outlandish accompaniment figure at the opening springs
to mind). Liszt’s piano style here and in Harmonies poétiques et religieuses
is totally emancipated from the glitter of the fashionable ‘brilliant’ piano
style. Instead, the sonority of other instruments is now increasingly recalled,
whether it be orchestral tremolos in the first Apparition, string quartet tex-
tures in the Andante religioso of Harmonies, or trumpets and trombones in
its central section.
It is no coincidence that 1833–4 also saw the transcription of Berlioz’s
Symphonie Fantastique and his overture to Les Francs-juges for piano. The
first of these marks a milestone in keyboard transcription, as Liszt himself
intended. A few years later, in 1838, he described in an open letter to Adolphe
Pictet his approach to this arrangement:
If I am not mistaken I have begun something quite different with my

transcription of the Symphonie Fantastique by Berlioz. I have worked on this
as conscientiously as if it were a matter of transcribing Holy Writ, seeking to
transfer to the piano not just the general structure of the music, but all its
separate parts, as well as its many combinations of rhythm and harmony.
He then went on to outline the most important of his new projects in this
area:
What I undertook in the Berlioz symphony I am now setting out to do for

Beethoven. Serious study of his works, a profound appreciation of their
almost limitless beauties, and on the other hand the techniques I have
become familiar with owing to my constant piano practice, have perhaps
made me less incapable than others for this difficult task . . . The
arrangements previously in use have now been rendered useless; they would
be better called ‘derangements’.10
Liszt had already finished his transcriptions of Beethoven’s symphonies

5, 6 and 7 by the time this was written. Although he tackled the funeral march
of the Eroica in 1843, the rest of that symphony and the remaining works had
to wait until 1863–4, when he also revised his earlier versions of nos. 5–7. The
whole set was published in 1865, and in the preface (not always reproduced
in modern editions) Liszt commented: ‘My goal has been reached if I stand
on the same level as the intelligent engraver or the conscientious translator
who understand the spirit of a work and thus contribute to the knowledge of
great masters and to the formation of an appreciation of beauty.’ There can
be little doubt that he achieved these aims. Schumann, in his famous review
of the transcription of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, went further:
Liszt has worked out his arrangement with so much industry and
enthusiasm that it might be regarded as an original work, a summary of his
profound studies and a practical school of score-playing at the piano. This
art of reproduction, so completely different from the attention to detail of
the virtuoso, the many types of touch that it demands, the effective use of
the pedal, the clear interweaving of separate parts, the collective grasp of the
orchestral masses; in short, the understanding of means and possibilities as
yet hidden in the piano can only be the work of a master.11
In fact, Liszt’s transcription of Berlioz’s symphony remained the only

edition of the work available for several years (hence Schumann was forced
to base his review on it rather than on an orchestral score), and appeared
at Liszt’s own expense, no publisher being found to undertake the risk of
printing the arrangement of a difficult modern symphony by a then fairly
obscure French composer. Berlioz’s reaction to the arrangement was simply
‘astonishing’.12 While he was working on the transcription Liszt also found
time to compose a short fantasy in A major on its main theme, entitled
L’idée fixe, andante amoroso. In this initial version it makes an apt prelude to
the A major second movement, ‘A Ball’, one of the only two movements that
Liszt ever performed in public. In 1865 he revised his fantasy, transposed
it into B major, and used it as a preface to a reworked edition of the other
movement in his repertoire, the ‘March to the Scaffold’. Strangely, the so-
called ‘second edition, revised and corrected’ (in reality little changed) of
the whole symphony that appeared in 1876 reverts to an earlier version of
this movement, and pianists tackling the complete work (admittedly a small
if hardy band) would be well advised to consider the 1865 edition of the
‘March’ as representing Liszt’s true final thoughts for this movement.
The transformation of piano technique

Although Liszt maintained ambitions to compose orchestral and choral
music, and even another opera (to succeed the forgotten Don Sanche of
1824–5), his plans from the 1830s to the mid-1840s were mostly confined
to ideas and brief sketches, apart from some works for piano and orchestra.
Publicly at least he downplayed these projects in the same 1838 letter to
Pictet excerpted above (if indeed downplaying is the right term, in view of
the hysterical prose):
Even if you are surprised to see me so exclusively occupied with the piano,
and so little hurried to assay the wider field of symphonic and dramatic
composition . . . You do not know that to talk to me about giving up the
64 Kenneth Hamilton
piano is to make me look upon a day of sorrow . . . For, you see, my piano is
to me as his ship is to a sailor, or his steed to an Arab, even more perhaps,
for until now my piano is me, it is my speech – my life. It is the intimate
repository of all that went on in my mind during the most passionate days of
my youth . . . and you, my friend, would like me to abandon it to run after
the more glittering successes of the theatre and the orchestra? Oh, no! Even if
I admitted that which you too easily assert, that I am now ready for music of
this kind, my firm resolution is not to abandon the study and development
of the piano until I have accomplished everything possible with it.13
Pictet might have been forgiven for thinking that by the end of 1838
Liszt had already scaled the heights of piano virtuosity, having completed
much of the Album d’un voyageur, several Herculean operatic fantasies and
the Douze Grandes Etudes, soon to be followed by the first version of the six
Etudes d’après Paganini (or rather seven, for one appeared in two versions). It
had been the unforgettable impact of Paganini’s violin-playing in 1831 that
stimulated Liszt to obsessively practise the piano in an attempt to acquire
unmatched keyboard dexterity. Shortly after hearing Paganini he wrote:
For a whole fortnight my mind and fingers have been working like two
damned souls: Homer, the Bible, Plato, Locke, Byron, Hugo, Lamartine,
Chateaubriand, Beethoven, Bach, Hummel, Mozart, Weber are all around
me. I study them, meditate on them, devour them with fury; in addition I
practise four to five hours of exercises (3rds, 6ths, octaves, tremolos,
repeated notes, cadenzas etc.). Ah! Provided I do not go mad, you will find
an artist in me! ‘And I too am a painter!’ cried Michelangelo the first time he
saw a masterpiece. Your friend . . . cannot stop repeating those words of the
great man ever since Paganini’s last performance . . . What a man, what a
violin, what an artist! Heavens! What sufferings, what misery, what tortures
in these four strings!14
Following a typically Romantic conception of the ‘artist’, Liszt seems as much

interested in general cultural education as in musical here, painfully aware
as he was of his deficiencies in formal education. His initial musical reaction
to Paganini was the Grande Fantaisie de Bravoure sur La Clochette, in which
he treats the celebrated La Campanella theme from Paganini’s B Minor Vio-
lin Concerto, op. 7 to a profusion of rather too extravagant variations. A
later variation set on Paganini’s Carnaval de Venise remained unfinished.
The Paganini studies, based on Paganini’s violin caprices, sported a dedica-
tion to Clara (Wieck) Schumann, although Liszt might have realised they
were hardly suitable for her performance style (or tastes). As a gesture of
respect and friendship to her husband Robert he also included (in the first
edition) his more restrained transcription of Paganini’s G Minor Caprice
printed as an ossia above his own version (the first study). Considered as a
whole these pieces, and the others mentioned above, confirmed Liszt as the
pre-eminent piano technician of his era, a fact admitted even by his closest
rival, Sigismond Thalberg.
How far Liszt had progressed in little over a decade can be seen by a
comparison of the Douze Grandes Etudes with their original source, the Etude
en douze exercices. The 1826 studies, though musically negligible, are a fair
compendium of early nineteenth-century piano technique – a technique
based on brilliant passage work, much of which can be accomplished by
swift finger-action, with relatively little required of the wrist and arm other
than that they be steady, relaxed and (of course) supportive. This had been
typical harpsichord technique, was easily transferred to the early piano with
its light touch and shallow fall of key, and continued to be recommended
by teachers and treatises in the nineteenth century. ‘Independent’ finger-
action was so prized that various mechanical devices were sometimes fitted
to the piano in order to ensure that the student was unable to use much
wrist-movement. Ludicrous as these might seem now, such contraptions
were recommended by pre-eminent pianists such as Kalkbrenner, and even
by the young Liszt, though there is no evidence that he himself ever used
one. (He did, however, have a practice piano made with an especially heavy
action.)
The doctrine of playing with a quiet wrist – or at least aiming to play
with one – lasted well beyond its practical utility. Even by 1818, the date of
the completion of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata, op. 106, a freer piano
technique was really required, and it is no coincidence that Liszt was the
first pianist to give a public performance of this sonata nearly twenty years
later. In doing so he had, according to Berlioz, accomplished a feat hitherto
thought impossible. For pianists confined to the older style of keyboard
technique, the octaves, chords and leaps of Liszt’s mature music presented
insurmountable difficulties. Stimulated by Paganini, by the mould-breaking
genius of his friend Chopin, and by a desire to reproduce orchestral sonori-
ties on the piano, Liszt completely re-modelled his technique in the early
1830s. The Fantasy on Auber’s La Fiancée of 1829 had already shown him to
be a consummate master of finger-dexterity. By the end of the next decade
he had revolutionised many other aspects of piano-playing.
This achievement was not without its drawbacks for Liszt the composer.
In the first place most of his piano music was too difficult for many other,
even professional, pianists to tackle with success, so public performance
was often limited to his own concerts. In the second place, the thicket of
technical hazards presented by works such as the Grandes Etudes made
their value as music more difficult to appreciate. Attempts by inadequate
players to run through them must have resulted in a cacophony till then
hardly equalled from a single performer. In an otherwise generally positive
review of the studies for the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Schumann explicitly
66 Kenneth Hamilton
stated that Liszt’s concentration on virtuosity had been at the expense of his
development as a composer, an opinion that persists in some circles to this
day. The fact that certain features of his harmonic style were as avant-garde
as his piano writing was for his detractors yet another reason for accusing
him of creative poverty. Had his musical language been as pedestrian as
that of Pixis or Herz it might well have gained more immediate acceptance,
although it is unlikely we would be writing about it now.
Whatever the praise garnered by Liszt’s ground-breaking transcriptions,
they were hardly enough to establish him as a significant composer in his
own right. By the mid-1830s his published output of original works had
been scanty indeed, and the most recent were far too hermetic and abstruse
to have any general appeal. In contrast to Chopin, Liszt was very much a
performer first and a composer second in the eyes of the public. He set out to
alter this in the latter part of the decade, producing several sets of pieces that,
in their Weimar versions at least, remain firmly a part of the standard concert
repertoire. The later reworkings are discussed below along with the initial
versions. Liszt himself considered that the revised publications completely
superseded the originals, but the latter are still sometimes performed and
recorded today.
Album d’un voyageur/Années de pèlerinage :

Switzerland and Italy
Like so many artists, Liszt seemed to require a muse to inspire him to large-
scale creative activity. For his Weimar period this was embodied in Princess
Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, his mistress and adoring worshipper at the
shrine of his compositional genius. Within a year of meeting Liszt she had left
her husband and moved to Weimar, where she spent the next decade inde-
fatigably steering him away from brandy and cigars and towards his writing-
desk. Liszt’s dedication to her of his twelve Weimar symphonic poems was
probably no more than her due. The previous outpouring of ambitious
piano compositions from 1835 onwards was stimulated by a no less unusual
woman, Marie, Comtesse d’Agoult, who that year left her husband and
eloped with Liszt to Geneva. Soon afterwards, their first child, Blandine, was
born. The time spent in Geneva and its environs with Marie resulted in Liszt’s
first major published piano cycle, Album d’un voyageur (the title adapted
from George Sand’s Lettres d’un voyageur, one of which was addressed to
Liszt) composed between 1835 and 1838. Of its three parts, the first, Impres-
sions et Poésies later formed the basis of the initial ‘Swiss’ volume of the 1850s
Années de pèlerinage. The two other parts – Fleurs Mélodiques des Alpes (to
modern ears no doubt a wincingly precious title) and Paraphrases – consist
of arrangements of and fantasies on Swiss folk melodies or themes by Swiss

composers. Liszt’s and d’Agoult’s travels around Italy from 1837 to 1839
also bore musical fruit in the unpublished first versions of several of the
pieces that were to make up the second ‘Italian’ volume of the Années.
Publication of the complete Album d’un voyageur had to wait until 1842,
by which time Liszt’s relationship with d’Agoult was in terminal decline, but
the three paraphrases appeared as early as 1836. The first and last pieces –
an ‘Improvisation’ on the Ranz des Vaches and a Rondo on the Ranz de
Chèvres – were both based on tunes by Ferdinand Huber (1791–1863). The
second piece, ‘Un Soir dans les Montagnes’, uses a melody by the Basel music
publisher Ernst Knopf as an introduction and postlude to an Alpine storm
scene, adumbrating the Schiller Lied ‘Der Alpenjäger’ as well as providing the
idea for what would become ‘Orage’ from the Swiss Année. Although Liszt’s
‘storm’ music all shares general features, no specific musical material from
‘Un Soir dans les Montagnes’ or any of the other paraphrases appears in the
Années, which allowed Liszt to republish them, extensively revised, in 1877
as Trois Morceaux Suisses. This was not the case with Fleurs mélodiques des
Alpes, the second and third of which became ‘Le Mal du Pays’ and ‘Pastorale’
in the later collection, and the fifth and eighth again use melodies by Huber.
(The other pieces feature Swiss folk material of anonymous provenance.)
Of Impressions et Poésies, only one number, ‘Psaume’, was based on an
external source, in this instance Psalm 42 of the Geneva Psalter composed by
Louis Bourgeois. This slight and harmlessly bland piece was understandably
not included in the Années, but the rejection of the vigorous and powerful
‘Lyon’ presents more of a puzzle. Bearing the superscription ‘vivre en travail-
lant ou mourir en combattant’ (to live working or die fighting) of which the
opening bars are obviously a setting, the work commemorates a rebellion
of the impoverished weavers of Lyon against their economic masters, and
uses a main theme similar in contour and spirit to the Marseillaise. Liszt had
visited Lyon himself and was appalled at the conditions in which the work-
ers lived. His genuine indignation called forth a worthy musical response
that, however unsuitable for inclusion in the ‘Swiss’ Année, surely deserved
reissue as an independent piece. It has been suggested that this never took
place owing to Liszt’s unwillingness to display overt revolutionary sym-
pathies after taking up employment in the Weimar court.15 Whatever the
reason, ‘Lyon’ deserves a better fate than to languish in a collection of pieces
declared obsolete by the composer himself.
All of the other numbers of Impressions et Poésies were revised for inclu-
sion in Années de pèlerinage, some relatively lightly in a manner that affected
mainly the keyboard setting, like the gently lilting ‘Le lac de Wallenstadt’
or the sparkling ‘Au bord d’une source’, which glistens in a pianistically
much more adept manner in the later version. The three remaining works,
68 Kenneth Hamilton
‘La Chapelle de Guillaume Tell’, ‘Les Cloches de G . . .’ and ‘Vallée

d’Obermann’, were revised much more extensively. The slightly inchoate
early version of ‘La Chapelle de Guillaume Tell’ was structurally consid-
erably tightened up, and reworked into a much more straightforward and
effective ABA form with a short introduction and coda. ‘Les Cloches de
G . . .’, entitled less enigmatically ‘Les Cloches de Genève’ in the Années,
was originally written to express the intense feelings Liszt experienced on
the birth of his daughter Blandine. The first version is a rather sprawling
sonata-form movement, with a lyrical cantilena in B major as the first group
(played over imitations of the eponymous bells in the middle part) and a
swaying barcarolle melody as the second. After a relatively short develop-
ment, the first group returns in the tonic via the submediant key of A major,
in a variation of the tonal procedure found in Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata
(where it is the second group that returns to the tonic via the submediant).
Liszt abandoned this formal scheme in the revision, and totally recast the
work in terms of structure, material and tonality. A thinned-down version
of the initial section remains, but the barcarolle melody no longer follows.
Instead it is replaced by an Italianate new theme, one of Liszt’s loveliest, most
deeply felt melodies, in the same key – B major – as the first theme. More
surprisingly, there is no recapitulation of the first theme – only its bell-like
accompaniment returns in a brief coda. This Introduction/A/B/Coda form
is highly unusual, and was perhaps suggested by Chopin’s G Minor Noc-
turne, op. 15, which also has no recapitulation of the opening theme. The
resulting new structure has little to do with sonata form other than the fact
that it uses two distinct thematic groups, but of course any tonal polarity is
completely absent (Liszt adopted a similar procedure in the exposition of the
‘Gretchen’ movement of his Faust Symphony). The fascinating differences
between ‘Les Cloches de G . . .’ and this innovatory recomposition are so
great that the pieces could well be considered separate works that happen
to share some thematic material.
The situation is not quite as extreme with ‘Vallée d’Obermann’, inspired
by the novel of the same title by Senancour, although many of the changes
Liszt made here were also radical. Both pieces dramatically and vividly
communicate the ennui and longing of the hero in Senancour’s novel, but the
second version as a musical structure is better balanced, more inventive and
more satisfying. The original ‘Vallée’ is a monothematic sonata movement
in E Minor with a rhapsodic introduction based on three descending notes,
G-F-E. The entire piece is developed from this figure, which is expanded
to create a first subject theme reminiscent of that of the first movement of
Weber’s Sonata in E Minor. A second group in the relative major consists
of a Dolcissimo con amore transformation of the theme, again similar to
that of Weber, which obviously constituted a potent background model.
The fiery development initially elaborates music from the introduction,

eventually leading into a long recapitulation in E minor/major. In all, the
last eight pages of an eighteen-page piece are in E, and with the arrival of
the closing bars that key has long outstayed its welcome.
Liszt’s recasting of this piece turned it into one of his most sublime
achievements. Many of the problems with the earlier version can be traced
to its almost pedantic sonata structure. The close similarity of the exposition
and recapitulation fatally weakens the effect of the latter, while the long
anchor on the tonic key engenders a feeling of tedium rather than resolution.
In the later version resemblances to a sonata layout are far more distant.
Among other changes, there is no recapitulation of the main theme in the
minor; the major mode appears immediately after the central development,
to incomparably greater effect. The exposition too is recomposed. Liszt
replaces the relative major with the submediant major (C), juxtaposing it
starkly with the initial E minor. Again the result is striking and directly
moving in a way that far surpasses the earlier version. The vast expansion
of Liszt’s compositional range and technique is rarely so evident as here.
‘Eclogue’ and ‘Orage’ are the only two pieces written for the Swiss Année
not to have specific antecedents in the Album d’un voyageur, although both
fit the new collection well in spirit. Several pieces for the Italian Année were
also written at the time of the Album, but remained in manuscript until
their revised Weimar incarnation, and were not published until 1858.
‘Sposalizio’, based on Raphael’s Lo sposalizio della Vergine, is one of Liszt’s
most gorgeously numinous works, with touches of pentatonicism and fre-
quent use of mediant harmonic relations in a perfectly proportioned slow-
movement sonata structure. The much shorter and starker ‘Il Penseroso’,
inspired by Michelangelo’s well-known statue, makes extensive use of aug-
mented chords and dissonant suspensions to create a musical world of
resignation and despair, to which the next piece, ‘Canzonetta del Salva-
tor Rosa’, an arrangement of a carefree tune by Bononcini, is evidently the
antidote. The following Petrarch Sonnets are transcriptions of Liszt’s own
songs, much revised from the earlier piano versions published in 1846. The
sonnets are extremely well contrasted – languid, passionate and limpidly
elegant respectively – and filled profusely with memorable melody.
The first version of the final piece of the set, titled ‘Après une Lecture du
Dante’ from the poem by Victor Hugo, was written in the late 1830s and orig-
inally called ‘Fragment nach Dante’, but the published work is chiefly a result
of a revision in 1849, when the title was briefly changed to ‘Paralipomènes
to Dante’s Divine Comedy’, and of further changes made before its eventual
publication. ‘Fragment nach Dante’ was in two thematically related parts,
and the original titles show that in conception the piece had everything to
do with Dante, and nothing to do with Victor Hugo. The 1849 revision
70 Kenneth Hamilton
conflated the two parts into a single-movement sonata form. The Dante
Sonata evinces the tonal layout common to many of the symphonic poem
sonata forms of Liszt’s Weimar years, in other words a dissonantly turbu-
lent minor-key first group (utilising long-held bass pedals to produce the
requisite cloudy sonority) followed by a plainchant second group in the
raised mediant major (D minor – F major) featuring some striking whole-
tone progressions. A prominent aspect of the work is the use of a tonally
dislocating tritone figure (first heard opening the piece) as part of the main
thematic material. This tritone figure recurs at major structural points, and
thus functions in a similar way to the opening descending-scale theme of
the Sonata in B Minor. There is, too, a second group derived from the first
subject material that itself was initially adumbrated in the slow introduc-
tion. Although the work is intended as a depiction of scenes from the Divine
Comedy, it should be emphasised that the piece follows only a very general
narrative plan. The struggle–triumph trajectory that Liszt follows here is
common to a great number of his works. Indeed he deliberately chose ‘sub-
jects’ that could be interpreted in this manner – Prometheus, Obermann,
Faust, Tasso and other suffering, yet ultimately redeemed, characters. Such
an emotional course is easily fitted to a minor-key sonata form with a
recapitulation in the tonic major, although obviously other structures are
possible, as exemplified in Mazeppa, which follows the tonic minor–major
plan without reference to sonata form.
“Harmonies poétiques et religieuses”

The complete Album d’un voyageur appeared in 1842, at the height of Liszt’s
Glanzperiode – his ‘glory days’ as a touring virtuoso. In the same year he
accepted a position as honorary Kapellmeister in Weimar, though his concert
tours continued until 1848, when he took up permanent residence in the
town. As the 1840s progressed, Liszt became yet more concerned about the
establishment of his reputation as a serious composer. It was at this point
that he began to make concrete plans for what was eventually to become his
series of symphonic poems, and for an (unfinished) opera Sardanapale (after
Byron).16 His thoughts had also turned to his early piano piece ‘Harmonies
poétiques et religieuses’, which he had intended to be a first in a cycle of
pieces. This planned cycle was eventually sketched in 1845, utilising some
old and some newly written music, and a heavily revised cycle was eventually
published in 1853.
As conceived in 1845, the cycle contained four pieces that were discarded
for the published edition: ‘Litanie de Marie’, ‘La Lampe du Temple’, ‘Hymne
du Matin’ and ‘Hymne de la Nuit’. Some material from ‘Litanie de Marie’
went into an expanded recomposition of the exhortatory ‘Invocation’, the

first number of the cycle. Three additional numbers in the published version,
‘Ave Maria’, ‘Pater Noster’, and ‘Hymne de l’enfant à son réveil’, are tran-
scriptions of simple choral pieces Liszt wrote in 1846–7. ‘Pensée des morts’
is of course a rewriting of the original ‘Harmonies poétiques et religieuses’,
with a much extended second half that also uses material from the unfin-
ished and unpublished Psaume Instrumentale ‘De Profundis’ for piano and
orchestra that Liszt sketched in the early 1830s. The overall effect of this revi-
sion is to increase emphasis on the consolatory aspects of the music. The
febrile first half is somewhat tamed, the ‘de profundis’ melody is at one point
given a tranquil keyboard setting strongly reminiscent of the first movement
of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ Sonata, and the final cadence provides a deci-
sive close, instead of the still-open question of the earlier version. Several
commentators have felt that Liszt went too far in taming the experimental
radicalism of the first ‘Harmonies poétiques’, but the re-composition does
indeed seem emotionally richer and better balanced.
The ‘Miserere d’après Palestrina’ included as the eighth number of
Harmonies is neither based on Palestrina (Liszt was misled as to the
source of his material) nor particularly successful, but the ninth, ‘Andante
Lagrimoso[sic]’, is movingly direct in its emotional expression. Unfortu-
nately the final piece in the cycle, ‘Cantique d’amour’, now seems some-
what sentimental and cliched. (Despite its emotional bombast, Joachim
Raff appears to have remembered it well enough when he came to write the
‘Andante Finale’ from his opera König Alfred.) The remaining two items in
the set, ‘Bénédiction de Dieu dans la Solitude’ and ‘Funérailles’, are among
Liszt’s very finest inspirations. The intensely felt main theme of the former,
wreathed by an intricately novel accompaniment with hints of pentatoni-
cism, is evidently a setting of the opening of the Lamartine stanzas at the
end of the score ‘D’où me vient, o mon Dieu, ce paix que m’inonde?’ Liszt
was extremely fond of this piece, often performing it for visitors in Weimar.
‘Funérailles’ bears the subtitle ‘October 1849’, a month that marked not
only the death of Chopin, but also the execution by the Austrians of thirteen
Hungarian generals after the failed revolution in Liszt’s homeland. Liszt had
been deeply affected by both events, the latter all the more in that he had
been criticised for not personally standing shoulder-to-shoulder with his
countrymen in their bid for freedom. Heine, in his poem ‘Im Oktober 1849’,
remembering the famous Hungarian ‘sword of honour’ that Liszt often
sported ludicrously at concerts, commented acidly ‘his sabre also/ lies in a
chest of drawers’. The ‘Hungarian’ nature of the ‘Funérailles’ main theme –
based on the gypsy scale – is plain to see, as is the suggestion of Chopin
in the martial triplets that lead the work to its climax. ‘That is essentially
an imitation of Chopin’s famous polonaise [op. 53]; but here I have done
72 Kenneth Hamilton
it somewhat differently’, Liszt told his students.17 The harmonic scheme is

indeed completely different from Chopin’s, but the reminiscence is a potent
part of the musical meaning of a piece that maintains a consistently profound
level from the opening tumultuous clangour of the funeral bells to the final
hollow fifth.
Etudes
The Transcendental Studies of 1851 are thorough revisions of the 1837
Grandes Etudes. Although occasionally Liszt pruned away some detail in
the new version with perhaps an excess of enthusiasm (many places in the
E major study, for example, the ossia LH accompaniment in the fourth, or
some of the inner figuration in the second study), there can be little doubt
that the later collection is pianistically more concise and structurally less
prolix. One could have sympathised with any musician of 1840 who put
Liszt’s Grandes Etudes on his piano stand, stared in bafflement at the jungle
of seemingly impossible figurations, and decided instead to practise Thal-
berg’s ‘Fantasy on Rossini’s Moses’, for, in their 1837 version, some of the
studies are so textually overloaded that they can sound jumbled even when
mastered. This problem is particularly evident in the first two pages of the
F minor Etude, which otherwise is one of the best works in the set. In the
tauter Weimar revision, its musical value is more apparent.
Given the inordinate difficulties of the piano writing, it is not surprising
that few noticed that the F minor study and two others were innovative
sonata forms strongly influenced by Beethoven, for these were composed at
a time when the understanding of Beethoven shown by Liszt’s fellow virtuosi
was at a very low ebb. In both collections the C minor, F minor and D
major studies are ambitious sonata designs. Rhythmically and harmonically
heavily reminiscent of Berlioz (recalling the tritones of the ‘March to the
Scaffold’ and the rhythmic audacities of the final movement from Harold in
Italy, the whole of which Liszt had transcribed in 1836), the C minor study
is monothematic – all second-subject material is developed from the first
subject. Liszt creates a second group of dual character, one section based
on the jagged chordal figure of bars 2–3, the other a lyrical theme spun
out from the descending scale for bar 1. The second tonality is the relative
major, recapitulated in the tonic major. This tediously long recapitulation
was drastically cut in the 1851 version: the return of the first group in the
minor was eliminated altogether, and the recapitulation now starts with the
second group in the tonic major. The parallels with ‘Vallée d’Obermann’ are
compelling, not just in monothematicism and tonality, but also in Liszt’s
revision procedures as they affect the recapitulation.
One of the most noteworthy features of the turbulent F minor study is

that here Liszt breaks away from a reliance on the relative major as con-
trasting key. Now we have the distinctly iconoclastic key of the flattened
leading note minor (E minor). This is no mere academic point. E minor
is a key of lesser tension relative to F minor, and placing the second group
in this tonality noticeably increases the depressive mood of the music. Liszt
obviously took this exact key scheme from the first movement of his beloved
‘Moonlight’ Sonata, but the ‘Appassionata’ Sonata too was a potent model.
The link with the ‘Appassionata’ is most evident in the 1837 version, in which
we find a Presto feroce coda closely modelled on that in the last movement of
the Beethoven. Liszt largely excised this in 1851, leaving only the similarity
between the main theme of the study and that of Chopin’s op. 10, no. 9 as
a sign of external influence.
The almost impressionistic D major study is scarcely less original in its
tonal construction. Here the second key is E major (flattened mediant), but
the surprise lies in the almost polytonal overlay of the first group. Consistent
polytonality in a first group is virtually impossible to handle in conventional
sonata form, for there would be no way of establishing a tonic key. Liszt’s
first group here is firmly rooted in D major by the bass (which merely
swings between the tonic and dominant notes), but the right hand strews
chords hinting at E major over this solid foundation, anticipating the even-
tual arrival of the second group. The colouristic effect created is a stroke of
genius decades ahead of its time. Needless to say, all this requires an unusu-
ally massive confirmation of D in the recapitulation, which we duly get,
clamorously heralded in the 1837 version by a gargantuan dominant pedal
(Allegro vivace) that the older Liszt found unnecessarily extravagant.
The sonata form of these three Grandes Etudes was a new feature of
their 1837 rewriting. The very first version, the Etude en douze exercices of
1826, contains few hints of it, save perhaps in the central modulation to
E major of the C minor study, which is prophetic of Liszt’s later favourite
second group key area. Of course, when Liszt turned this into a fully fledged
sonata movement in 1837, he forsook E major as a second key for the more
conservative relative major. It is important to note that none of the revi-
sions made in 1837 had anything to do with programmaticism. The familiar
titles, ‘Wilde Jagd’ (Wild Hunt) for the C minor study and ‘Harmonies du
Soir’ for the one in D, fitting though they might be, only appeared in the
Weimar final version (Etudes d’exécution transcendente). Even in this ver-
sion the F minor study remained devoid of title, as did that in A minor,
which some have suggested calling ‘Paganini’ because of its violinistic leaps.
Liszt had originally intended to use the appellation ‘Wilde Jagd’ for the
‘Scherzo and March’ (see below), but only the D minor study ‘Mazeppa’
had been given a title before 1851, in a separate edition with a dedication
74 Kenneth Hamilton
to Victor Hugo and a new ending. This ending is indeed programmatic,

representing Mazeppa’s final triumph after his nightmarish ride across the
steppes, but is the only example of material added to the studies for pro-
grammatic reasons. However apt the titles may appear, they were in most
cases devised nearly twenty-five years after the initial conception of the
music. Paradoxically, discussion of the studies, taking its cues from the
titles, has often concentrated overly on supposedly descriptive elements in
the music. At least the sheer keyboard imagination they display has always
been recognised, and was acknowledged even by the contemporary critic
Fétis, a one-time partisan of Liszt’s rival Thalberg. Fétis could hardly have
failed to notice that the G major study (‘Vision’ in 1851) was a tribute to (or
parody of) Thalberg’s famous arpeggio writing in his ubiquitous ‘Moses’
fantasy.
Some of the other studies focus more specifically on individual pianistic
problems, like the tremolo of no. 12 (‘Chasse Neige’ – one of the most
impressively concentrated and austere pieces in the set), the octaves of no. 7
(‘Eroica’) or the double notes and filigree passages of no. 4 (‘Feux Follets’).
While ‘Chasse Neige’ had its recitative passages cut in the revision, ‘Feux
Follets’ remained mostly unchanged. ‘Eroica’, on the other hand, is the only
study where there is an arguable case for preferring the 1837 study above that
of 1851. Liszt’s shears were perhaps a little too active in trimming the bravura
display of the earlier version. No. 1 (‘Preludio’) is in both sets a short quasi-
improvised prelude of the type that many performers of the time used to
play extempore before each new piece of music (Kalkbrenner, for example,
published a whole set of preludes of this nature). No. 3 (‘Paysage’) and No. 9
(‘Ricordanza’) are both lyrical pieces, but remarkably, ‘Ricordanza’s’ elegant
main melody was taken over almost unchanged from the A major study of
the Etude in Douze Exercices, although the piece as a whole grew far beyond
the range of its predecessor.
The Paganini Studies of 1839–40 were revised in a similar manner to the
Grandes Etudes, and published in their new form in 1851. The violinistic
effects of the second transcendental study are naturally found in many
numbers of this set, which ends with a transcription of Paganini’s own
variations on his celebrated A minor theme. (Liszt was particularly amused
to hear echoes of this study in Brahms’s Paganini variations, despite the
latter’s notorious public repudiation of his music.) With the Paganini Studies
it is sometimes difficult to make a choice between versions. The celebrated
La Campanella is certainly more concise and effective in the later edition,
but with the other studies the advantages are more evenly balanced, for
Liszt’s rewriting often removes some of the youthful exuberance from the
original version without any particularly enticing compensation apart from
greater ease in performance.
Liszt’s first contribution to a piano school was the rather perfunctory

‘Morceau du Salon, Etude de Perfectionement’, written for Fétis’s Méthode
des Méthodes in 1840 and slightly expanded in 1852 under the title ‘Ab Irato’.
The two concert studies ‘Waldesrauschen’ and ‘Gnomenreigen’ (1863), how-
ever, written for Lebert and Stark’s Klavierschule, are among Liszt’s happiest
inspirations. The Trois Etudes de Concert of 1849 were unconnected with any
piano treatise, and a subsequent publication emphasised their poetic rather
than technical aspects by adding the titles ‘Il Lamento’, ‘La Leggierezza’ and
‘Un sospiro’. The first hardly seems particularly apt, but all three are now in
common usage, and the latter two pieces are among Liszt’s most frequently
played works. ‘La Leggierezza’, a study in sinuous passage-work, has many
hints of Chopin’s study op. 25, no. 2 (also in F minor) while ‘Un sospiro’
adopts Thalberg’s ‘arpeggio’ style, but swathing a melody of more limpid
beauty than its originator himself ever conceived.
The Sonata in B Minor and other Weimar works

Liszt’s first step toward an expanded one-movement sonata form, eventually
perfected in his B Minor Sonata, was the rather unimaginatively named
Grand Concert Solo in E Minor of 1849.18 This must be one of the few
large-scale works of Liszt for which no one has suggested a hitherto hidden
‘programme’, perhaps because it has never been well enough known for
anyone to bother. A distant model was Chopin’s ‘Fantasy’ in F minor, a
loose sonata form with a slow section interpolated between development
and recapitulation. Commissioned by the Paris Conservatoire as a test piece
for a piano competition, the Concert Solo was originally written without
the central slow section. Liszt sketched out an arrangement for piano and
orchestra of this version before deciding to make this addition. The work has
often been considered as a preliminary sketch for the Sonata in B Minor,
partly because of its structure and partly because a member of the first
group of themes bears a strong resemblance to a theme in the Sonata, one of
Liszt’s favourite melodic tags, which also makes an appearance in the Faust
Symphony, among other works. The transformation of the first group theme
into a Grandioso second subject (in the relative major) also anticipates the
Sonata, although in the latter the Grandioso melody is new. A central slow
section (Andante sostenuto) consists of three varied statements of a slightly
saccharine D major/F minor theme. (Unfortunately, the evident kinship
between this and the slow theme of Chopin’s ‘Fantasy’ painfully points
up the inferiority of Liszt’s inspiration here.) The recapitulation includes
a funeral march transformation of the Grandioso theme, and a return of
the Andante sostenuto in the tonic major before a closing peroration based
76 Kenneth Hamilton
on the Grandioso. The parallels between the original coda of the B Minor
Sonata and the end of the Concert Solo are significant, as is the identity of
the tempo designations: Allegro energico – Grandioso – Andante sostenuto –
Allegro energico. Yet again (compare the first version of ‘Vallée d’Obermann’
or the C Minor Study from Douze Grandes Etudes) the maintenance of a long
area of tonic stability in the recapitulation causes problems for Liszt, who
appears momentarily unable to think of a way of retaining interest along
with E major. In his reworking of the piece for two pianos, published as
Concerto Pathétique (1856), he cut the Gordian knot by simply transposing
a large chunk of the recapitulation down a semitone into E major. This
certainly makes for more variety, and should be considered by performers
of the solo version.
Soon after finishing the Concert Solo Liszt composed the splendid Fan-
tasy and Fugue on ‘Ad nos, ad salutarem undam’ for organ (or pedal piano),
a monothematic sonata analogue in which the fugue begins the recapitu-
lation and a slow section fulfils some of the functions of a development.
The slow section here is tonally remote from the outer parts of the work,
its F major in a tritone relationship to the C minor tonic. The sense of
distance is emphasised by the slow section beginning with the only full,
unadorned statement in the whole piece of the Meyerbeer choral theme.
(For some unaccountable reason, Busoni omitted this passage from his oth-
erwise magnificent solo arrangement.) Few pieces give a better idea of Liszt’s
advanced chromatic language than the Fantasy and Fugue. In the opening
pages the theme is presented in a variety of complex harmonisations over
a tonic pedal. As each phrase ends inconclusively on a dissonant chord the
music is propelled forward, seeking a harmonic resolution it never attains,
in increasingly baffled frustration. It is easy to see why Wagner found Liszt’s
harmonic style so important for the development of his yearning Tristan
chromaticism.
Although the ‘Ad nos’ fantasy did not appear in a conventional arrange-
ment for piano solo by the composer himself, the Prelude and Fugue on
the Name BACH was transcribed for piano both in its original (1856) and
its more thoroughly worked-out revised form (1870). This work and the
Variations on a Theme of Bach’s ‘Weinen, klagen, sorgen, jagen’ (1862 –
based on the 1859 Prelude using the same theme, and written in response to
the death of Liszt’s son Daniel) show Liszt’s use of complex chromatic har-
mony at its bleakest and most intense, although characteristically both end
in a triumphal, redemptive manner, the latter with a consolatory peroration
based on the chorale ‘Was Gott tut das ist wohlgetan’.
The Scherzo and March (1851), which displays the same dark chromatic
sound-world with a hint of diablerie, makes use of elements of sonata struc-
ture in a creative and novel manner. The first Scherzo section is a sonata form
with a second group in the dominant minor (D minor – A minor), the preva-
lence of the minor mode contributing to the bleakly demonic atmosphere.
The development treats the themes fugally before they are recapitulated in
the tonic minor. The March (in B major) takes the place of the Trio of the
Scherzo, which then returns in varied form only up to the middle of the
exposition (where the music originally began its move to A minor). A starkly
powerful coda combines March and Scherzo themes as a virtuoso whirlwind
in D. Though it certainly lacks a certain melodic warmth, this is a superb
and rewarding work.
The Sonata in B Minor (according to the manuscript, ‘finished on the
2nd of February 1853’) marks the zenith of Liszt’s piano music, occupying
the same position as the Faust Symphony in his orchestral output, or the
oratorio Christus in his choral. The composer’s failure to provide a pro-
gramme for the Sonata has been rectified by numerous critics, who have
mostly seen in the piece another commentary on Goethe’s Faust – a pianis-
tic double, therefore, of the Faust Symphony. Other suggested interpreta-
tions include the autobiographical (the Sonata is in some sense a ‘character
sketch’ of the composer himself) and the eschatological (a musical version
of Milton’s Paradise Lost). Liszt would perhaps have had no justification for
complaining about these invented programmes, for he himself advanced
similarly far-fetched conjectures for Chopin’s music; but the fact remains
that neither the composer, nor the pupils who studied the Sonata with him,
ever mentioned a programme in connection with the piece, which was the
culmination of many years of experimentation with sonata form, and an
attempt to follow in the footsteps of Beethoven in this most prestigious of
genres.
Unlike the Dante Sonata, the Sonata in B Minor was intended from the
outset to have only one vast movement, but within this Liszt encapsulates
elements of the more common three- or four-movement sonata form. The
idea of encapsulating elements of several movements in one might be con-
sidered fundamentally Beethovenian (see, for example, the last movement
of the Ninth Symphony), but already by 1822 Schubert in his Wanderer
Fantasy had successfully achieved the same feat. The Wanderer Fantasy was
one of Liszt’s favourite concert pieces, which he also arranged for piano
and orchestra in 1851. Many fantasias, for example those of Beethoven
and Hummel, or even Kalkbrenner’s dilapidated Effusio Musica, are com-
posed of short, contrasting sections in a variety of keys and tempi. Schubert,
however, follows a more complex plan, using thematic transformation to
link sections together in a scheme of opening (C major), slow interlude
(C minor), scherzo (A major) and finale (C major, beginning with a fugal
exposition). Liszt succeeded in the B minor Sonata in reconciling Schubert’s
approach with a balanced sonata structure.
78 Kenneth Hamilton
The idea that an important piece could consist of one movement alone,
and not the usual three or four, seemed to have particular appeal to Liszt.
In a review written in 1837 of some of Schumann’s piano music, discussing
in particular the sonata entitled Concerto without Orchestra, Liszt mused
over the history of concerto form.19 Previously a concerto had to have three
movements, he thought. Field, however, in his Concerto no. 7, had replaced
the second solo section of the first movement with an Adagio, Moscheles in
his Concert Fantastique, op. 90 had united the three movements into one,
and Weber, Mendelssohn and Herz had also proceeded along this path. The
future lay in free treatment of traditional form, a future that his own music
was to embrace enthusiastically.
Although there were precedents for concerti and fantasias in one contin-
uous movement, there were none for the piano sonata. The marriage of the
fantasy, which was normally in one movement, with the traditional sonata
that Liszt attempted had been foreshadowed by Beethoven in his two sonatas
‘quasi una fantasia’, op. 27. These sonatas are directed to be played with-
out a break between movements. Op. 27, no. 1 is especially notable in this
regard, for the movements themselves are not independent, unlike op. 27,
no. 2 from which the first movement is so often excerpted that many think
it alone constitutes the famous ‘Moonlight’ Sonata. Individual movements
in op. 27, no. 1 are further linked by thematic connections (most obviously
that of the initial falling third) and by the recall of the Adagio movement
just before the end of the piece. This cyclical recall was to become a favourite
device of many Romantic composers, and is also a feature of Beethoven’s
later sonata op. 101. Liszt performed both op. 27 sonatas frequently, and
neatly inverted their title for the final version of Après une lecture de Dante,
which he described as ‘Fantasia quasi Sonata’.
The exposition and recapitulation of Liszt’s Sonata in B minor can be con-
sidered as analogous to the first movement and finale of a four-movement
sonata, while the slow section and fugal scherzo that take up most of the
development supply the other two hypothetical movements. Although a
mastery of a fluid chromatic harmony is everywhere in evidence, the basic
key relationships are deliberately more conventional than are usual with
Liszt – the second subject is in the traditional relative major, while the slow
section is in the dominant. This conventional outline points up all the more
starkly the originality of the off-key opening (first in the Phrygian mode,
then in a ‘gypsy-scale’ G minor) which has a subtle consequence in the
false recapitulation initiated by the scherzo much later in the work. The
scherzo has a paradoxical position, at once part of the development and a
thematic recapitulation, but in the ‘wrong’ key of B minor. The return to
the tonic B minor is gradually prepared as the scherzo progresses, and the
home key is finally confirmed with the passionate combination first heard
in the exposition of the two main allegro subjects. We can see from a deleted
section of the manuscript that Liszt originally recapitulated the Grandioso
second subject too in combination with the first allegro theme, but removed
the latter in his final version. One other afterthought was the replacement
of a brash and histrionic fff ending with the wonderful coda that now stands
in the score – an ethereal conclusion that brings the work full circle to its
opening theme, at last played in the tonic key, followed by three mystic
harmonies in the high treble.
Listz’s stylistic eclecticism, in other contexts sometimes found jarring, is
seen at its most controlled and personal in the B Minor Sonata. In no other
Romantic composer, with the possible exception of Meyerbeer, is there such
a range of differing elements – from Germanic chromaticism and thematic
development to Italianate lyricism, taking in elements from French Grand
Opera and Hungarian Gipsy music along the way. That Liszt was able to
weld these into a distinctive personal style was one of his most remarkable
achievements. If the cantilena second subject of the Sonata appears Ital-
ianate, albeit married to distinctly un-Italian chromatic harmony, then the
majestic repeated chords of the Grandioso theme recall no less the world of
the French Grand Opera chorus – compare the ‘Blessing of the Daggers’-
scene from Les Huguenots – transfigured by a melody of vastly greater nobil-
ity. (Similar writing can be found in ‘Invocation’ from Harmonies poétiques
et religieuses.) The opening ‘gypsy’ scale also proclaims Liszt’s Hungarian
origins, as does the occasional ornamental turn later in the piece.
The B Minor Sonata’s keyboard style is uniquely Liszt’s in contrast of
tessitura and texture. Unlike the music of Schumann and Brahms, which
mostly unfolds in block writing around the centre of the keyboard, Liszt’s
music ranges through all areas of the instrument and displays an acute
ear for piano sonority. This feeling for tonal colour is not a meretricious
overlay on top of the music, but an essential part of the composition. The
thud of the lowest note on the keyboard adds significantly to the effect of the
dominant pedal preparation for the Grandioso second subject, while the vast
gap between registers at the very end of the piece is essential to the musical
meaning. Liszt here uses his virtuoso’s insight into the capabilities of the
piano to produce music of the highest spiritual quality. Extreme sensitivity
to keyboard texture and sonority is also heard in the Berceuse written only
a little later, the first version (1854) closely modelled on Chopin’s piece of
the same name, but the second (1862) displaying greater originality in the
effusive beauty of its decorative figurations.
As a significant afterthought to the Sonata, Liszt composed in the same
year his Second Ballade in B minor. He had already composed a first Bal-
lade in 1845, a large-scale ABA structure with many points of interest but
fatally compromised by a sentimental and repetitive principal theme. The
80 Kenneth Hamilton
second Ballade is on a very different level. Liszt thought very highly of this
piece (‘Who plays this great and mighty Ballad of mine?’, he once asked in a
masterclass20 ), and with good reason. The opening pages contrast two sub-
jects after the manner of sonata form, a nobly troubled theme in B minor,
followed by a gently winsome melody in the dominant. This whole expo-
sition is repeated, but unusually transposed a semitone lower. The ensuing
development is so extensive that one begins to re-evaluate the exposition as
perhaps having been only an introduction, but the structure is successfully
balanced by a weighty recapitulation and coda, marked by a particularly
beautiful, expiatory transformation of the opening melody. As with the
Sonata, Liszt had originally supplied the Ballade with an extrovert, virtu-
oso coda, before deciding that a subtly restrained conclusion was more in
keeping with the emotional complexity of the piece.
Liszt returned to a more elaborate version of the tripartite structure
used in the First Ballade for his first Mephisto Waltz, the second of Two
Episodes from Lenau’s ‘Faust’, which appeared in 1862. This world-famous
virtuoso warhorse is organised like a mini-version of the three movements
of the Faust Symphony, with a contrasting central slow section followed
by a demonically distorted repetition of the first section. The imitation of
birdsong heard towards the end of the piece is also found throughout the first
of Two Legends (1862–3), St Francis of Assisi: The Sermon to the Birds. This
charmingly colourful work looks forward to French Impressionist keyboard
styles and was frequently performed by Liszt himself in the 1860s and 70s,
along with the flamboyantly dramatic St Francis de Paolo Walking on the
Waves.
The opera fantasies and associated works

A vast amount of Liszt’s compositional activity from 1835 to 1848 was
directly connected to his concert tours, manifested in a large number of
fantasias and transcriptions on operatic melodies and other popular tunes,
including the first versions of what would eventually become the Hungarian
Rhapsodies. The best of the operatic pieces, like the fantasia on Meyerbeer’s
Robert le Diable or Mozart’s Don Giovanni, are in effect original works
offering a fascinating new perspective on the operas’ themes. They are also,
in the realm of piano technique, some of the most imaginative music ever
written for two hands at one keyboard.
Though Liszt’s pianistic endeavours met with unparalleled success all
over Europe, his tours were not without their difficult moments, which
included the occasional near-empty hall, and an unexpected forced trip in
an open cattle wagon during a visit to Scotland. Such incidents no doubt
encouraged humility in the ‘King of Pianists’, who otherwise was taxed only
with the admiration of the adoring masses. It would have been easy for him
to ride on his success and keep only a few bravura works in his repertoire,
routinely trotted out at each new venue. Such tactics are not unknown today.
Liszt, however, was gifted – or afflicted – with an intellectual restlessness that
prompted him to explore a wide range of music. A catalogue of his concert
repertoire that he had made soon after settling in Weimar includes not only
a vast array of crowd-pleasers, but also sonatas of Beethoven, Hummel,
Weber and Schumann – hardly standard concert fare for the period. His
production of concert fantasias and transcriptions was equally varied and
profuse.
Liszt had planned several opera fantasias in the years 1831–4, but the
only one that seems to have been written around this time was a now
lost composition based on Bellini’s Il Pirata, praised by Berlioz as display-
ing ‘admirable art’.21 His sudden hurry to publish his Fantasy on Halévy’s
La Juive (1835) and the ensuing completion of fantasias on ‘I tuoi frequenti
palpiti’ from Pacini’s all-but-forgotten opera Niobe (this aria was still known
as a showpiece in the repertoire of Guiditta Pasta) and Meyerbeer’s Les
Huguenots can be explained by the enormous Parisian success of Sigismond
Thalberg, whose fantasy on Rossini’s Moses was one of the great hits of 1835.
Thalberg had developed a so-called ‘three-handed’ piano texture, where a
legato melody in the centre of the keyboard was decorated above and below
with chords or arpeggios cleverly laid out to give the impression that even
they alone required two hands for performance. This effect, soon to become
routine, required a skilful manipulation of the pedal and was utterly new at
the time. Czerny, no tyro in matters of piano technique, declared that Thal-
berg’s Vienna concerts ‘excited the greatest astonishment’ and that ‘even
the most experienced pianists could not understand the possibility of these
effects’.22
Liszt himself was less impressed, if also evidently less objective, describ-
ing Thalberg’s playing as ‘of all things declared superior, definitely the most
mediocre that I know’.23 He pointedly chose to perform his hectically vig-
orous Niobe fantasy for the famous ‘duel’ with Thalberg in the salon of
Princess Cristina Belgiojoso on 31 March 1837, when his animated bravura
made a complete contrast with Thalberg’s almost emotionless calm when
performing his trademark rolling arpeggios. Opinion on the outcome of
this charity concert (in aid of indigent Italian refugees) was divided, as the
two players’ styles really were so different as to make them incomparable,
but it was probably justly remarked that Thalberg would have benefited
from a little of Liszt’s verve and fire (his tranquillity was dangerously close
to boredom), and Liszt from a little of Thalberg’s repose (which might have
prevented him banging the pedal with his foot so loudly).
82 Kenneth Hamilton
Ironically, in later life the outward aspects of Liszt’s playing (though cer-
tainly not the sound) came more to resemble Thalberg’s, the white-haired
Liszt having moderated the flailing gestures of his youth. Thalberg’s trade-
mark ‘three-handed’ arpeggio effects also turn up in Liszt’s music after 1837,
especially in his 1839 transcription of the Sextet from Lucia di Lammermoor
(Réminiscences de Lucia di Lammermoor, first part), which nevertheless is
very different from Thalberg’s arrangement of the same piece, and in the
Norma Fantasy, dedicated to Liszt’s fellow pianist and sometime more-than-
good-friend Marie Pleyel. Liszt explained how the latter dedication came
about: ‘Madame Pleyel wanted . . . a piece of Thalbergian brilliance from
me. I therefore dedicated the Norma Fantasy to her . . . When I then met
Thalberg, I said to him “I’ve written down everything of yours there.” “Yes”,
he replied, “there are Thalberg-passages there that are almost indecent.”’24
Soon after Princess Belgiojoso’s celebrated concert, the bizarre work
that had been originally intended to form its centrepiece was completed –
Hexameron, a set of variations on ‘Suoni la tromba’ from Bellini’s I Puritani,
with a variation each contributed by Thalberg, Liszt, Pixis, Herz, Czerny and
Chopin. Liszt shaped the contributions into a coherent (if at times tedious)
whole by providing interludes, an introduction and finale. Not surprisingly,
the contributions of Liszt and Chopin are almost embarrassingly superior
to the wretched clichés trotted out by the other composers, which makes for
a more than usually uneven work. Hexameron remains a curiosity, although
it was performed repeatedly by Liszt on his tours, most often in a shortened
version for piano and orchestra. Liszt’s own full-scale fantasy on Bellini’s
I Puritani was also published in 1837, but soon found by the composer
himself to be rather over-long, with nearly 200 bars of relentless sequential
development garrulously ensconced in the middle of the piece. In later life
Liszt could laugh at this miscalculation. At a performance of this fantasy
in Rome by Sophie Menter, Liszt’s companion in the audience had fallen
asleep. When a fortissimo abruptly woke her up, Liszt took her hand and
said: ‘My dear friend, it’s going to finish soon!’25 The finale, an arrangement
of the well-known polonaise ‘Son vergin vezzosa’ from Act I, was routinely
excerpted by Liszt for concert performance, and published separately in
1842.
Although Liszt’s Fantasy on Rossini’s Maometto remained unpublished
and is now lost (it perhaps bore some relation to a set of variations on a theme
from The Siege of Corinth – an alternative title for Maometto – composed in
1830, of which only the introduction survives), his 1838 transcription of the
overture to William Tell appeared in print a few years later, by which time
it had become a mainstay of his concert repertoire (‘That piece brought me
many a Thaler’26 ). Rossini himself was amazed that Liszt had managed to
fit the flute accompaniment in around the main melody in the pastorale,
and the exhilarating final section is no less adroit. From around the same
period comes an unpublished fantasy on Mercadante’s Il Giuramento (1838),
performed at least once by Liszt under the title Réminiscences de la Scala,27
and Réminiscences de Lucia di Lammermoor (1839 – sometimes erroneously
dated to 1836). This was eventually published in two parts (part two as
Marche et Cavatina) owing to the publisher’s qualms over the sheer length
of the piece. The first part was one of Liszt’s most frequently performed
works, and even in the repertoire of Clara Schumann, but unfortunately the
second part of the fantasy is not entirely satisfactory as a stand-alone piece,
for the ending quotes material from the first part that would aptly round
off the entire fantasy, but sounds strangely unmotivated when the second
part is heard in isolation.
By common consent some of the fantasies Liszt wrote in the early 1840s
are his finest achievements in the genre. Although Réminiscences de Lucrezia
Borgia (1841 – again published in two parts, the second part revised in 1853)
possibly outstays its welcome, it does contain some of Liszt’s most richly
imaginative piano writing, including far from conventional figuration for
the left hand (part one, bar 99ff.) and a bravura use of glissandi in thirds
and sixths in the finale of the second part. A fantasy on Halévy’s Guitarero
that Liszt played in Kassel in 1841 is now lost, an extensive and interesting
fantasy on Der Freischütz from the same period has remained unpublished,
but another on themes from Mozart’s Nozze di Figaro and Don Juan, though
forgotten in Liszt’s lifetime, survives in an almost complete format. A version
of this, edited by Busoni, appeared in print in 1912 (Breitkopf & Härtel)
and has received relatively frequent performance. Strangely, Busoni forgot
to mention that as well as adding a few bars to complete the finale, he had
also omitted nearly one third of the music (all the material based on Don
Juan).28 An adroit completion of Liszt’s ambitious original version by Leslie
Howard has now been published (Editio Musica, Budapest).
Liszt himself was openly proud of his fantasies on Bellini’s La Sonnam-
bula, Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable, Bellini’s Norma and Mozart’s Don Juan.
All form an adept, brilliant and often even moving transcription of the
operas’ principal themes, arranged in a format that sometimes provides
a summary of, or commentary on, the dramatic action. The fantasies on
La Sonnambula and Robert le Diable contain striking polyphonic combina-
tions of Liszt’s own invention (and the Norma fantasy adopts a combination
from Thalberg’s fantasy on the same opera). The thematic combination in
La Sonnambula (‘Ah, non giunge’ and ‘Ah! Perche non posso ordiari’, both
from Act 2) is played together with a trill using the outer fingers of the
right hand and a bass provided by the left. Such was the effect of this feat at
some of Liszt’s own performances that the music had to stop during applause
lasting several minutes. Wagner appears to have remembered one of the
84 Kenneth Hamilton
combinations in the Robert le Diable fantasy (which he heard in Paris in

the early 1840s) when composing the recapitulation of the overture to Die
Meistersinger, but often it is the pianistic dexterity of Liszt’s polyphonic
treatment that is most impressive, rather than any contrapuntal sleight of
hand. As many of Meyerbeer’s and Bellini’s melodies unfold around the
same well-worn sequence of chords, the fact that they can be made to fit
together is scarcely a great surprise.
Formally, Liszt’s fantasies are enormously varied. The sonata-form out-
line that was a notable feature of the very early ‘Impromptu on Themes of
Rossini and Spontini’ recurs very rarely – only in the Fantasy on Wagner’s
Rienzi (1859) and the transcription (more of a transformation) of the Waltz
from Gounod’s Faust (1861). The fantasies on I Puritani and Il Giuramento
have separate sections linked by the recurrence of a short ritornello, that on
Robert le Diable is in a fairly clear-cut tripartite A1/B/A2 form (it is possible
that Liszt’s unpublished arrangement of ‘Robert, toi que je t’aime’ was at one
time intended to form an introduction to this fantasy), Norma is in linked
sections each in a key a major third higher than the last, with a recapitulation
of one of the most powerful themes as a climax, and Don Juan is in three
main sections linked by the recurrence of the Commendatore’s music heard
in the opening. The central section of Don Juan is a set of variations on
‘Là ci darem la mano’, the finale an increasingly frantic arrangement of the
‘Champagne’ aria ‘Fin ch’han dal vino’, rounded off by a final reminder of
Don Juan’s damnation. Commentators with aesthetic viewpoints as diverse
as Bernard Shaw and Busoni have found much to admire in this pinnacle
of piano virtuosity, the latter basing his own Chamber-Fantasy on Bizet’s
Carmen on Liszt’s model.
With fantasies like the one on Don Juan, and the set of Hungarian Rhap-
sodies published in 1853 (many based on earlier pieces entitled Magyar
Dallok), the boundaries between arrangements and original composition
are well and truly blurred. That Liszt’s creative engagement with music
frequently did not recognise such boundaries can be best shown by A la
Chapelle Sixtine. Miserere d’Allegri et Ave verum corpus de Mozart (1862,
also in a version for organ entitled Evocation à la Chapelle Sixtine). This
piece, which seems in some ways like a piano version of a symphonic poem
(there is also a reworking for orchestra), was inspired by the famous story
of the youthful Mozart breaking the Vatican’s monopoly on performances
of Allegri’s Miserere by notating it from memory after hearing it sung only
once in the Sistine Chapel. It consists of some rather dark, gloomy and very
free variations of part of the Miserere, mostly in the lower register of the key-
board, followed by a drastic contrast of tessitura with a more faithful (but
still not quite exact) transcription of Mozart’s slightly saccharine Ave verum
corpus in the treble of the piano. A short coda brings both works, and their
contrasting registers, together, before the music fades away ethereally into
silence. An unusual piece, certainly, even bizarre, but also rather affecting
in its sincerity and complete absence of a trivialising ‘post-modern’ irony.
The question whether this music is an arrangement or an original creation
hardly needs to be asked, and can scarcely be answered. What is important is
simply the fact that it, like most of Liszt’s music, has something to commu-
nicate. Not all of Liszt’s piano works are masterpieces, and he certainly did
not maintain the rigorous quality-control of a composer like Chopin, but
even his failures can be fascinating, strewn as they often are with moments
of genius. In this respect, as in so many others, he was indeed the typical
Romantic artist.
5 Liszt’s late piano works: a survey
ja m e s m . ba ke r
I have been ensconced in the small tower of the Villa d’Este since the evening before last . . . It is
more than comfortable: above all during the winter, when the invasion of civilized-barbarians
makes my staying in Rome insufferable. Here I find myself again at my best; my apartment is very
nicely arranged: two fireplaces, a new lamp hung from the ceiling of a little parlor which acts as a
boudoir, – books and music in abundance, – in addition, the magnificent terrace with the dome of
St. Peter’s at the edge of the horizon, and the venerable cypress-patriarchs you know so well.
. . . To fulfill my duties as a Christian, and to spend my time suitably by continuing to write my
notes, is my whole life: nothing else concerns me in the slightest.1
When he took up his new quarters in the Villa d’Este in 1869, Franz Liszt
was 58 years old, and he seemed to recognise that a new phase of his life was
beginning. The Villa afforded the seclusion he needed to escape the demands
of a hectic schedule and to turn his attention to what he most wanted to
do – write music. Nonetheless, he was not able or willing to renounce the
obligations he felt toward his public, his Hungarian homeland, his Roman
Catholic faith, and especially the significant group of young musicians who
sought his guidance. He had hit upon the arrangement of a ‘vie trifurquée’
that he was to maintain for the remainder of his years, dividing his time
between Rome, Weimar, and Budapest.
Liszt had returned to Weimar in January 1869, having been away for
eight years, to take up residence at the Hofgärtnerei (the court gardener’s
house) provided for him by the Grand Duke Carl Alexander. In Weimar his
main preoccupation was his teaching, for here gathered a group of young
pianists from all over the world – some superbly talented, others not – who
participated in master classes that took place up to three times a week. In
Budapest, Liszt was involved from 1873 in the planning of the Royal Academy
of Music, serving as its first President upon its founding in 1875. He became
a sort of elder statesman for an adoring Hungarian public. He lent his
support as well to younger innovative composers, including Borodin, Cui,
and Rimsky-Korsakov of the Russian Nationalist school, and the fledgling
composer Claude Debussy, with whom he met on three occasions in January
1886, just months before his death on 31 July. No doubt Liszt’s ever youthful
and adventurous imagination derived sustenance and inspiration from their
fresh approach to harmony and form.
[86]
87 A survey of the late piano works
Liszt’s state of mind during his last years

Despite the promise that the trifocal organisation of Liszt’s later years would
allow him to complete the many compositional projects he had in mind, this
proved not to be the case. For one thing, besides the travel between Rome,
Weimar, and Budapest, Liszt continued each year to accept many invita-
tions to engagements throughout Europe, logging an estimated 4,000 miles
a year in railroad travel in rugged third-class accommodations. (His thrifty
nature would not allow him the luxury of first-class travel.) He kept up a
voluminous correspondence with various friends, patrons, and musicians,
and was unfailingly gracious when callers arrived. But the pressure of social
and professional obligations caused him a great deal of anxiety. In a letter
written in November 1875, Liszt complained:
Up till now it has been impossible for me to concentrate steadily on my

musical work because of this too flattering and steady harassment by my
correspondents in various countries. Some ask for concerts, for advice, for
recommendations; others for money, for jobs, for decorations, etc., etc. . . . I
don’t know what will become of me in such a purgatory.2
In Liszt’s later years, problems with health – both physical and mental –
affected his ability to complete compositions. During the last five or six
years of his life, he suffered from swelling in his feet and legs, and from
failing eyesight as well. In July 1881 he fell down a flight of stairs at the
Hofgärtnerei and was bedridden for weeks thereafter; this accident proved
pivotal, in effect precipitating the onset of old age at age seventy.
From around 1876, Liszt was prone to bouts of depression. His person-
ality even from youth seems to have manifested a morose side and a fixation
on death, which some have speculated went back to the shock he suffered at
age sixteen, just as he was finishing up a three-year stint of concertising, when
his father suddenly died. The deaths of his son Daniel in 1859 and daughter
Blandine in childbirth in 1862 brought another phase of deep personal
anguish that impacted greatly on his creative life. As he grew older, Liszt was
deeply affected by the deaths of certain political figures, artists, and personal
acquaintances, including the Emperor Maximilian I in 1867, Hungarian
composer Michael Mosonyi in 1870, his patrons Marie Mouchanoff and
Baron Augusz in 1874 and 1878 respectively, and especially Richard Wagner
in 1883. These events, among others, triggered within him impulses resulting
in elegiac outpourings that range from the unusual to the bizarre.
Liszt’s episodes of depression seem to have arisen partly from anxiety
about his own creative abilities. In February 1876 he wrote:
To tell the truth, I have an increasingly poor opinion of my things, and it is

only through my reaction to the indulgence of others that I manage to find
88 James M. Baker
them acceptable. On the other hand, I greatly enjoy many of the

compositions of my colleagues and masters. They amply repay me for the
tediousness and shortcomings of my own.3
Poor reviews from certain critics had shaken his confidence, as indicated in
these comments from a letter written in March 1878:
It stands clearly written, a hundred times over, that I cannot compose;

without indulging in unseemly protests against this, I quietly go on writing,
and set all the greater store by the constancy of some of my friends.4
His doubts actually caused him to discourage performances of his large

works:
For years past I have been mostly obliged to dissuade people from the
performance of my large works. The general public usually goes by what is
said by the critics, whose most prominent organs among the newspapers are
hostile to me. Why should I go into useless quarrels and thereby
compromise my friends? Peace and order are the first duties of citizens,
which I have doubly to fulfil both as honourable citizen and artist.5
Liszt was known for drinking considerable amounts of wine and cognac,
although with no detectable effects on his speech or piano playing, but
around 1882 his friends became alarmed at the quantity of his alcohol
consumption, which now included absinthe.6 It is likely that alcohol fed his
depressive moods and further limited his powers of concentration.
In the early 1870s Liszt was apt to blame his inability to bring composi-
tions to completion on pressing external obligations, but by the latter part
of the decade he opened up to certain of his friends about his fears of failing
creativity. He intimated to his mistress and confidante Princess Carolyne
von Sayn-Wittgenstein:
Without complaining, I often suffer from living – health of the body

remains to me, that of the soul is lacking. Tristis est anima mea! However, to
my numerous real and alleged faults will never be added that of ingratitude,
the very worst of all! From the bottom of my heart I bless you for
persevering for 30 years in actively wishing for me the Good, the Beautiful,
and the True. In this, you are heroic and sublime – and I feel unworthy to
unlace your shoes!7
Other comments reflect his dismay at his inability to realise what he

imagined:
By Pentecost of ’85 I hope to have finished the score of St. Stanislas. I write
slowly – cross out three-quarters, and then do not know whether the fourth
part can stand by itself.8
...
I am again guilty of being late, and for the same reason – or rather for the
same fault as formerly. This fault is writing music, a task which tires me
greatly and which I only carry out unhappily, finding my talent very
inadequate for the lively expression of my thoughts. Everything seems to me
listless and colorless - - - -9
Another reason for the aging Liszt’s experience of ‘composer’s block’ –

one not unfamiliar to later nineteenth-century composers – was his con-
sciousness of working in the shadow of composers he regarded as giants, for
him particularly Wagner and Beethoven. While he may have professed to
find consolation and inspiration in their works, there can be no doubt that
his difficulties in composing arose in part from the paralysing realisation of
their greatness. A poignant anecdote attests to his feelings of inferiority:
I frankly confess that the title of the pamphlet, ‘Beethoven and Liszt’, at first
frightened me. It called to my mind a reminiscence of my childhood. Nearly
fifty years ago, at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, I used often to notice a
harmless poodle keeping company in the same cage with a majestic lion,
who seemed to be kindly disposed towards the little chamberlain. I have
exactly the same feeling towards Beethoven as the poodle towards that
forest-king.10
What is most critical for us is that Liszt was not entirely deterred by his
insecurities and growing awareness of his waning powers. He continued
to work at his compositions until, about a year before he died, his failing
eyesight made it impossible for him to put pen to paper.
An overview of Liszt’s life and works shows that by the time he entered
what we now recognise as the ‘late’ period, he had composed all of his largest
conceptions: the Faust Symphony, the St Elisabeth and Christus oratorios,
as well as the largest keyboard works – the Piano Sonata and the two piano
concertos. During his last years his major project was an oratorio based on
the legend of St Stanislaus, begun in 1869 but never brought to completion,
ostensibly because of problems with the libretto, but more likely due to a
psychological block. Sometime in the 1880s Liszt sketched out a portion
of a third piano concerto, but this never came close to being finished. The
largest of the completed piano works from the late period are several col-
lections of short compositions: Weihnachtsbaum and the third book of the
Années de pèlerinage, published in 1882 and 1883 respectively; the Historische
Ungarische Bildnisse, a set of seven musical portraits of Hungarian politi-
cal and intellectual figures; and the Via Crucis, actually a piano version of a
tightly knit multi-movement choral piece, neither version of which was pub-
lished during Liszt’s lifetime. None of these collections was finished speedily.
Liszt mentioned the Weihnachtsbaum and Via Crucis sets to Princess Car-
olyne in a letter of 1 January 1874, stating that he expected to complete both
90 James M. Baker
in about six weeks. It is indicative of his creative path that he took another two
years to compose Weihnachtsbaum, and even then felt the need to tinker with
the collection for another six years before releasing it for publication. He did
not make much headway with Via Crucis until 1878, when in a feverish burst
of inspiration he composed most of it in a period of two weeks. He was confi-
dent enough to send off the choral version of Via Crucis along with two other
sacred choral works to the publisher Pustet in 1884, only to suffer the insult
of rejection. He conceived of the Hungarian Historical Portraits as a set in
1885, comprising four newly composed pieces and three earlier pieces dating
as far back as 1867. In 1877, Liszt likewise had composed five new pieces to
go along with three earlier works dating from 1867 and 1872, to make up the
third book of Années. The Via Crucis, Hungarian Historical Portraits, and the
troisième année of the Années de pèlerinage have not received the recognition
they deserve as major works. They are not mere collections of small pieces but
rather are highly integrated cyclic compositions of substance and depth. On
the whole, however, it would be accurate to describe Liszt’s compositional
output during his late period as a succession of short, independent works.
The music of Liszt’s later years has received scant attention from schol-
ars and performers, with the exception of one relatively small category of
pieces, which I call the music of ‘Premonition, Death, and Mourning’. Over
the past quarter century, this group of works has been the subject of a num-
ber of theoretical and analytical studies, thanks primarily to their daringly
experimental harmony, which seems to push beyond the limits of tonality,
as well as other unusual stylistic features. While works such as ‘Unstern!’ and
the two ‘Lugubre gondola’ pieces are fascinating and certainly warrant close
analysis, it is unfortunate that other equally important pieces have been
ignored. The general reputation of Liszt’s late music is that it is dissonant,
austere, and morbid – in total contrast to the tunefulness, ardent passion,
and brilliant virtuosic display typically ascribed to the music of his prime.
In point of fact, in his later years Liszt continued to compose the types of
music we associate with his earlier life – the transcriptions and paraphrases,
the festive marches, Hungarian rhapsodies, and the like. It is the purpose of
this essay to survey the entire spectrum of his later piano compositions, in
order to provide a balanced view of Liszt as man and artist during his final
years.
Aspects of style: the Elegie, ‘Die Zelle in Nonnenwerth’

While it is crucial to recognise a continuity between the middle and late
periods of Liszt’s career, it is nonetheless important to acknowledge that
there are significant differences in style between the two. Liszt’s late Elegie,
dating perhaps from 1880, affords an excellent opportunity to gauge the
differences in style, for it is a revised keyboard version of his song, ‘Die Zelle
in Nonnenwerth’, composed in the early 1840s. This song is of particular
interest because – for reasons to be discussed – Liszt revisited it a number of
times over the years. The diverse versions include four different keyboard
arrangements, the first three from the 1840s, the last written during his
final years (possibly 1880). A comparison of the fourth version with the
third, published in 1850 as the Feuillet d’album No. 2, reveals a number
of important stylistic differences. The introduction to the third version
(Ex. 5.1a) sets forth the distinctive juxtaposition of A minor six-four (weakly
representing the tonic) and F-minor chords in the first two bars, but then
concentrates on the dominant harmony for the next nine bars, supported by
a low-bass E2. The introduction to the later version (Ex. 5.1b) is at once more
extended but also harmonically more nuanced. The two-chord motive is set
forth in the first two bars, but then sequenced down through more exotic
harmonies, including a D minor chord in bar 4. Critical to the deliberate
harmonic vagueness of the introduction is the absence of the dominant note
in the low bass. The dominant harmony is never stated outright, but rather
is represented by the diminished-seventh chord on G (bars 10 and 12), two
elements of which are displaced by pungent appoggiaturas in cross-relation:
C resolving to D against C resolving to B. (The lone C appoggiatura in
bar 3 of the earlier version is ordinary by comparison.) Having arrived at
this eerie effect, Liszt seems charmed by its strangeness and cannot forgo
the temptation to repeat it in bars 11–12. Such lingering on captivating
sonorities is highly characteristic of Liszt’s late style, which often conveys
the sense of an improvisation by a musician whose consciousness is flooded
by reminiscences.
Another critical stylistic distinction arises with regard to the treatment
of the operatic climax on the cadential six-four in E major (the dominant
of A minor). It occurs with the straightforward romantic flourish in bars
26–8 in the third version (Ex. 5.2a). The parallel event in the fourth version
(Ex. 5.2b) is comparable until the trailing pair of lines in sixths, which ought
to cadence to the tonicised E major chord, somehow loses its sense of direc-
tion with the entry of E (bar 35), ending uncertainly on the diminished-
seventh chord in bar 38. The separateness of this sound-world from the
main body of the piece is emphasised by the change of key signature to four
sharps, which does not happen in the earlier version. It is as if this odd train
of thought leaves the composer somewhat disoriented, and he pauses for a
moment to collect himself, then picks up the main melodic strand in bar
41, equivalent to bar 29 in the third version.
The unaccompanied melodic passage, marked Dolcissimo, in bars 44–
50 in the fourth version (also shown in Ex. 5.2b) is a distinctive feature
of Liszt’s late style, in which monophony is frequently employed to avoid
strong harmonic definition and to create a pensive or brooding mood. An
92 James M. Baker
Example 5.1a Feuillet d’album No. 2, introduction
Example 5.1b Elegie, ‘Die Zelle in Nonnenwerth’, introduction

Example 5.2a Feuillet d’album No. 2, bars 26–30
equivalent passage does not occur at this point in the earlier version. The
arpeggiated melodic contour in 68 rhythm together with the element of
repetition (on the small scale within the phrase in bars 49–50, and on a
larger level with the repetition of the phrase doubled at the octave above
and extended in bars 58–61) invokes a pastoral topic and suggests a horn call
or bells echoing through countryside. (One is reminded of a comparable
passage at the close of the ‘Angelus!’ in Book III of the Années, also in E
major, in which Liszt simulated the effect of churchbells echoing through
the countryside.) The Dolcissimo indication marks this passage as being
of special emotional significance, and one cannot help but feel that the
preceding phrase, which has come to rest on the dominant in bar 45, has
somehow stimulated recollections of halcyon days now in the distant past.
It is important to note that this pastoral subject is not unique to the final
version of the song. It occurs in a very abbreviated form in the third version
(bars 64–7), stated without repetition in the key of the Neapolitan, B major
(here marked Leggierissimo and Perdendo; see Ex. 5.3a).
The mood of the Elegie darkens with the material in bars 65–72, roughly
equivalent to bars 36–44 in the earlier version (these passages are not shown
in examples). The later version offers a more extended transition in bars
75–84, however, using an unaccompanied melodic line which loses force
94 James M. Baker
Example 5.2b Elegie, bars 31–53
through excessive sequencing (picking up the figuration of the transitional

material in bars 33–8) and becomes harmonically vague as the chromatic
B creates an augmented sonority with the E and G of the dominant.
We have already noted the simple occurrence of the ‘pastoral’ passage in
the key of B in the third version. The fourth version offers a comparable
passage in B (bars 101–13; see Ex. 5.3b), here obviously a recurrence of the
earlier statement in E major, but one which is even further extended through
increased repetitions, along with a change of mode to B minor. Unlike the
third version, this episode receives its own key signature. The B passage in
Example 5.3a Feuillet d’album, bars 64–7
Example 5.3b Elegie, bars 101–13

96 James M. Baker
Example 5.4a Feuillet d’album No. 2, bar 108 to end
Example 5.4b Elegie, bar 128 to end
the third version precedes a grand cadenza, which in conventional manner

constitutes an authentic cadence of great structural weight. This version
then ends with the clearest possible harmonic definition, a low-bass tonic
pedal: A2 from bar 87 directly following the cadenza, and A1 from 103 to
the conclusion (see Ex. 5.4a). By contrast, the B episode in the final version
trails off into harmonically indefinite regions, as the introductory material –
already fairly vague – recurs in bar 114, strangely transposed up a semitone,
to begin the coda. The final version ends without benefit of low-bass support
for either dominant or tonic (see Ex. 5.4b). Instead, as is characteristic of
Liszt’s late style, a single melodic line is allowed to drift from bar 123 with
only occasional light chordal interjections, merely suggesting the A minor
tonic. The concluding high-register chords fade to nothing, creating a sense
of floating in time and space.
Yet another feature of the Elegie is highly indicative of Liszt’s late compo-
sitional practice: the structural development of chromatic pitch relations.
We observed the unusual cross-relation between C and C at the crux of the
introduction. These two pitches may be seen as encapsulating the conflict
between major and minor modes of the key of A. In the third version, this
relation is worked out simply: the first half of the piece is in A minor, the
second half is in A major, with a change in key signature continuing from bar
47 to the end (bar 116). The situation in the later version is entirely different.
Although stretches of the latter half of the piece are given the key signature
of A major, that key signature is cancelled at bar 122, and the final thirty bars
of the piece project the minor mode. But the conflict between C and C is
developed much further. It is highlighted in the transitional passage in bars
31–8, and affects the melodic detail in the subsequent passage in bars 43–4
(compare the parallel passage in bar 31 of the earlier version, which does
not feature C). The focus on C may itself have originated in the strange
turn toward D minor in bar 4 of the introduction, which is converted
to C minor in bar 5. We encounter D again in bars 108–13 in conjunc-
tion with the switch to B minor, and find it used fittingly as neighbour
to C in the upper voice of the concluding chord progression (bars 146–
52). In Liszt’s later music, chromatic development of the sort observed here
becomes a primary structural procedure at the root of his unusual harmonic
practice.
The big cadenza of the third version highlights the fact that it is an
extroverted outpouring of emotion. By contrast, the version of Liszt’s later
years does not indulge in such gestures, but rather is obviously engaged in
introspection and remembrance. All of the features noted – the nuanced,
vaguely delineated harmonies; the colouristic passages set off with distinc-
tive key signatures; the phrases that repeat or sequence until they trail off,
the development of poignant chromatic motives permeating the structure
from melodic detail and unconventional harmonies to the deepest levels of
structure – all create a sense of bittersweet nostalgia which surely reflects
Liszt’s state of mind in his last years.
That Liszt would take up the musical topic of ‘Die Zelle in Nonnenwerth’
late in life tells us something of the psychological motivation for much of
the late music. The song had originally been composed to set a poem by his
friend, Count Felix Lichnowsky, celebrating a desolate and mysterious island
in the Rhine whose main feature was a convent that had fallen into near ruin.
Liszt spent the summers of 1841 through 1843 on Nonnenwerth with Marie
d’Agoult, his mistress, and their three young children. This idyllic time was
98 James M. Baker
the last that the family spent together. Lichnowsky’s poem conveys his own
admiration of Marie but at the same time a profound sense of loss, which
must have captured something of Liszt’s mood at the time. In November
1842, after their second summer on the island, Liszt, while travelling and
separated from Marie, wrote to her, quoting Lichnowsky’s poem:
Here I am in front of Nonnenwerth once again, dear Marie.

Nicht die Burgen, nicht die Reben
Haben ihr den Reiz gegeben.
(Neither the castles, nor the vines
Have given [Nonnenwerth] its charm.)
I am going to sing those lines and set them to music, although I am in a
mood neither to sing nor to write, but quite simply to weep.11
Liszt must have been reflecting especially on the final couplet of the
poem:
Dies, das letzte meiner Lieder,

Ruft dir: Komme wieder, komme wieder!
(This, the last of my songs,
Calls to you: come back, come back!)
It is interesting that Liszt would return to this song, so strongly associated

with Marie, so many years after the two had become estranged. Their parting
had been bitter, and after Marie died in March 1876, Liszt had written to
Carolyne:
Barring hypocrisy, I could not bring myself to weep any more after her
passing than during her lifetime . . . [A]t my age condolences are as
embarrassing as congratulations. Il mondo va da sè – one lives one’s life,
occupies oneself, grieves, suffers, makes mistakes, changes one’s views, and
dies as best one can!12
It would have been impossible for Liszt to have written this, his final setting
of ‘Die Zelle in Nonnenwerth’, without thinking of Marie.13 The Elegie
clearly projects a mood of deep nostalgia, eliciting a sense of both tender
reminiscence and regret. It seems significant that Liszt had dedicated the
second piano version of the ‘Die Zelle in Nonnenwerth – likewise entitled
Elegie – to Marie d’Agoult. This piece, one of only three works the composer
saw fit to dedicate to her, was published in 1843, the last year they were
together. The late Elegie, then, may well have been for Liszt a private lament
for Marie (or, if not for her, then for their brief time together with their
children as a family), although he could not bear to acknowledge this publicly
in a dedication.14
Survey of the categories of Liszt’s late piano music

The comparison of the two versions of ‘Die Zelle in Nonnenwerth’ has dis-
closed many of the features of style and structure associated with Liszt’s later
years. Because his compositional practice continued to evolve throughout
this period, it is not feasible to use a single composition as a locus for every
aspect of his style. At this point, accordingly, we shall proceed to a gen-
eral survey of the late piano music, taking note of distinctive features in
particular compositions as necessary.
1. Music based on works of other composers

Liszt composed approximately 100 individual works (some of which are
themselves collections of pieces) from 1869 to the end of his life. These are
listed in Table 5.1, grouped according to the six categories: works based
on music by other composers; abstract pieces and studies; nationalistic and
celebratory music (subdivided into Hungarian pieces and music of other
nationalities); sacred music; music of premonition, death, and mourning;
and programmatic music and works with special titles. No effort at cate-
gorisation can be entirely satisfactory; there are many works which might
fit into more than one group. Certain pieces in Book III of the Années de
pèlerinage, for example, are sacred in character, while others are music of
mourning; but the programmatic nature of the collection as a whole neces-
sitates its being grouped with other programmatic pieces. These categories
prove useful for observing Liszt’s creative activity during the late period,
enabling us to discern trends in the types of pieces he chose to write at
various times, and to infer a variety of impulses and aims motivating his
compositional projects.
By far the largest category is that of ‘works based on music by other com-
posers’, comprising thirty-five items, two of which are collections of separate
pieces (two sets of arrangements of songs by Robert and Clara Schumann
composed in 1874). It is not generally recognised that Liszt continued to
write transcriptions and paraphrases virtually continually throughout his
career, the last a setting of a Tarantelle by Cui, composed in 1885. Many of
these are fantasies employing the dazzling virtuoso style of his earlier career
– for example the Réminiscences de Boccanegra composed in 1882 based on
the Verdi opera.
Liszt’s musical allegiances are clear from the composers whose works he
chose to set. During the late period he continued to proselytise on behalf of
Richard Wagner, setting music from Die Meistersinger (1871), Der fliegender
Hollände (1872), Der Ring des Nibelungen (1875), and Parsifal (1882). He
seemed equally fond of Italian music, composing arrangements of num-
bers from Verdi’s Aı̈da (1876), Messa di Requiem (1877–82), and Simon
100 James M. Baker
Table 5.1 Franz Liszt, late music for solo piano (1869–86)
Comp. Pub. Grove; NLE
Works based on music by other composers

Tanzmomente (Herbeck) 1869 1870 A245; ii/13
Der Schwur am Rütli (F. Draeseke) 1870 unpub. A251
Am stillen Herd (Die Meistersinger) 1871 1871 A254; ii/13
Puszta-Wehmut (Die Werbung; L. Gizycka) 1871 1885 A255; ii/13
Zwei Lieder (E. Lassen) 2. Ich weil in tiefer Einsamkeit 1872 1872 A211/2; ii/13
Frühlingsnacht (Schumann) 1872 1872 A257; ii/13
Ballade (Fliegender Holländer) 1872 1873 A259; ii/13
Lieder von Robert und Clara Schumann (1–7) 1874 1875 A264a; ii/24
Lieder von Robert und Clara Schumann (8–10) 1874 1875 A264b; ii/24
Dantes Sonett ‘Tanto gentile’ (von Bülow) 1874 1875 A265
‘Walhall’ aus dem Ring des Nibelungen (Wagner) 1875 1876 A269; ii/13
Una stella amica, mazurka (Pezzini) ?1875 1876 A270; ii/13
Danse macabre (Saint-Saëns) 1876 1877 A273; ii/14
Die Rose, Romanze aus der Oper Zemir und Azor (Spohr) 1876 1877 A275; ii/13
Aida, danza sacra e duetto final (Verdi) 1876 1879 A276; ii/13
Valse d’Adèle (Count Zichy) 1877 1877 A281; ii/11
Agnus Dei della Messa di Requiem di G. Verdi 1877–82 1879 A284/ii/14
Aus der Musik zu Hebbels Nibelungen und Goethes Faust 1877 1879 A285; ii/14
Sarabande and Chaconne (Almira von Handel) 1879 1880 A290; ii/14
Tarantelle (Dargomizhsky) 1879 1880 A291; ii/14
Revive Szegedin, marche hongroise de Szabady (arr. of arr. 1879 1892 A292; ii/14
by Massenet ded. to Liszt of work by Szabadi)
Polonaise (Evgeny Onegin by Tchaikovsky) 1879 1880 A293; ii/15
O Roma nobilis (Baini) 1879 unpub. A294; i/17
Variation, prélude à la polka de Borodine (variation on 1880 1881 A296; ii/15
‘Chopsticks’)
Seconda mazurka variata da Pier Adolfo Tirindelli 1880 1880 A297; ii/15
Liebesszene und Fortunas Kugel aus Die sieben Todsünden 1880 1881 A298; ii/15
(Goldschmidt)
O! wenn es doch immer so bliebe (based on songs by 1881 1881 A304; ii/15
A. Rubinstein)
Provençalisches Minnelied (based on Schumann’s 1881 1881 A306; ii/15
op. 139/4)
Réminiscences de Boccanegra (Verdi) 1882 1883 A314; ii/15
Feierlicher Marsch zum heiligen Gral aus Parsifal 1882 1883 A315; ii/15
(Wagner)
Drei Lieder aus J. Wolffs Tannhäuser 1882 1883 A316; ii/15
Valse de concert (J. Végh) 1882–83 1883 A318; ii/15
Symphonisches Zwischenspiel zu Calderons Schauspiel 1883 1883 A323; ii/24
Über allen Zauber Liebe (Lassen)
Der Asra (based on song by A. Rubinstein) ?1883 1884 A329; ii/15
Tarantelle (Cui) 1885 [1952] A327; ii/15
Small piano pieces (abstract)
Fünf kleine Klavierstücke 1865–79 (1, 2–1865; [1963] A233; i/10
3–1873; 4–1876;
5–1879)
Fantasie und Fugue (B-A-C-H) 1870 1871 A250; i/5
Technische Studien 1868–73 1886 A242;
Impromptu (Nocturne) 1872 1877 A256; i/12
Toccata ?1879 unpub. A295; i/12
Nationalistic and Celebratory Music
a) Hungarian
Ungarischer Marsch zur Kronungsfeier in OfenPest 1870 1871 A248; i/16
Am 8. Jun 1867
Ungarischer Geschwindsmarsch 1870–71 1871 A252; i/14
Einleitung und Ungarischer Marsch 1872 1873 A258
Epithalam zu Eduard Reményis Vermählungsfeier 1872 1872 A260; i/12
(Continued)
Table 5.1 (Cont.)
Szózat und Ungarischer Hymnus 1872 1873 A216; i/16

Fünf ungarische Volkslieder 1873 1873 A263; ii/13
A magyarok Istene (Ungarns Gott) (arr. of choral work; 1881 1881 A309/1; i/17
also in pf l.h. arr.)
Csárdás macabre 1881–82 unpub. A313; i/14
Ungarische Rhapsodie 16 1882 1882 A132/16; i/4
Magyar Király-dal (Ungarisches Königslied) 1883 1884 A328; i/17
Ungarische Rhapsodie 17 1884 ?1885 A132/17; i/4
2 Czárdás (include Czárdás obstiné) 1884 1885/1886 A333; i/14
Historische ungarische Bildnisse (incl. rev. vers. of A249, 1885 [1956–59] A335; i/10
A279; No. 3 written after A216?)
b) Other Nationalities
La Marseillaise 1866–72 1872 A236; ii/13
Gaudeamus igitur 1869–70 1871 A246; i/16
Vive Henri IV 1872–80 unpub. A262; ii/14
Siegesmarsch-Marche triomphale 1884 (1870s [1973] A332; i/14
acc. to NLE)
Carl August weilt mit uns, Festgesang zur Enthüllung des 1875 1887 A268
Carl-August-Denkmals in Weimar
Kaiser Wilhelm, national hymn 1876 unpub. A272
Polnisch (verso of Kaiser Wilhelm hymn) 1870s unpub. A253
Festpolonaise (for wedding of Princess Marie of Saxony) 1876 [1908] A274; i/17
Recueillement (for installation of Bellini monument in 1877 1884 A280; i/12
Naples)
Ländler, D (air cosaque) 1879 [1958] A289
Deux Polonaises de l’oratorio Stanislaus ?1880–84 1983 A302; i/17
Kavallerie-Geschwindmarsch ?1883 1883 A330; ii/2
Bülow-Marsch 1883 1884 A326; i/14
Abschied, russisches Volkslied (ded. Siloti) 1885 1885 A324; ii/15
Sacred Music
Ave Maria, II, aus den ‘9 Kirchenchorgesängen’ 1869–72 1871 A247; i/12
Sancta Dorothea 1877 unpub. A278; i/12
Zwölf alte deutsche geistliche Weisen 1878–79 unpub. A286a; i/10
Zwölf alte deutsche geistliche Weisen (Deutsche 1878–79 unpub. A286b
Kirchenlieder und liturgische Gesänge)
Via Crucis (associated with choral work also unpub. 1878–79 unpub. A287; i/10
during Liszt’s lifetime)
In festo transfigurationis Domini nostri Jesu Christi 1880 unpub. A300; i/12
San Francesco (Preludio per il Cantico del sol di ?1880 unpub. A301; i/17
S. Francesco)
Cantico di San Francesco (based on In dulci jubilo) 1881 unpub. A307; i/17
[A301 and A307 are unpublished keyboard arrangements of choral works, the first version of which was completed
in 1862; the second version of the choral work was composed in 1879–82 and published in 1884.]
Ave Maria (IV) 1881 [1958] A308; i/12
In domum Domini ibimus, Präludium für Orgel oder Klavier 1884 [1908] A331; i/17
Music of Premonition, Death, and Mourning
Monsonyis Grabgeleit 1870 1871 A249
Elegie I (Schlummerlied im Grabe) 1874 1875 A266; i/10
Elegie II (ded. L. Ramann) 1877 1878 A277; i/10
Dem Andenken Petöfis 1877 1877 A279
Elegie (4th keyboard version of Liszt’s song, ‘Die Zelle in ?1880 1883 A81d; i/17
Nonnenwerth, [comp. 1841], the other versions of
which date from the 1840s)
Trübe Wolken (Nuages gris) 1881 unpub. A305; i/12
(Continued)
102 James M. Baker
Table 5.1 (Cont.)
Unstern! Sinstre, disastro 1881 unpub. A312; i/12

La lugubre gondola (Elegie III)
First vers., 6/8 Dec. 1882 [1927 acc. to NLE] A319a; i/12
Second vers., 2/4 (4/4?) Jan. 1883 1886 A3119b; i/12
R. W.–Venezia (acc. to Walker, composed after 1883 unpub. A320; i/12
Wagner’s death, 13 Feb. 1883)
Am Grabe Richard Wagners (comp. on Wagner’s 1883 unpub. A321; i/12
birthday after he had died)
Schlaflos! Frage und Antwort 1883 unpub. A322; i/12
Trauervorspiel und Trauermarsch 1885 [1888] A334; i/12
Programmatic pieces and works with special titles
Weihnachtsbaum 1874–76; no. 7 1882 A267; i/10
rev. 1879–81
Carrousel de Mme P ?1875–81 unpub. A271; i/12
Der blinde Sänger 1877 1881 A282; i/17
Années de pèlerinage, troisième année 1867–77 (2–1867; 1883 A283; i/8
5–1872;
1, 2, 3, 4, 7–1877)
Zweiter Mephisto-Walzer 1878/9–81 1881 A288; i/17
Romance oublié 1880 1881 A299; i/12
Wiegenlied 1881 [1958] A303; i/12
Von der Wiege bis zum Grabe 1881 1883 A310; i/17
(4) Valses oubliées 1881 (no. 1) 1881 (1) A311; i/14
1883 (2, 3) 1884 (2, 3)
1884 (4) [1954 (4)]
Mephisto-Polka 1882–83 1883 A317; i/14
Dritter Mephisto-Walzer 1883 1883 A325; i/14
En rêve, nocturne 1885 [1888] A336; i/12
Vierter Mephisto-Walzer 1885 [1956] A337; i/14
Bagatelle ohne tonart 1885 [1956] A338; i/14
Boccanegra (1882). He considered Saint-Saëns a musical ally, and in 1876

set his Danse macabre, a work that may well have influenced some of his
own later diabolical works, such as the Csárdás macabre (1881–82). He
became a champion of Russian music of diverse styles and schools, setting
music by Dargomizhsky (1879), Tchaikovsky (1879), Rubinstein (1881 and
1883), and Cui (1885). He was particularly pleased to contribute in 1880 to
the second edition of a collaborative project organised by the Russians – a
collection of paraphrases on the popular tune ‘Chopsticks’. He gleefully had
written to Borodin, Cui, Liadov, and Rimsky-Korsakov in 1879:
You have done a work of serious value under the form of a jest. Your
‘Paraphrases’ [of ‘Chopsticks’] charm me: nothing can be more ingenious
than these 24 Variations and the 16 little pieces upon the favourite and
obligato subject. In short, here we have an admirable compendium of the
science of harmony, of counterpoint, of rhythms, of figuration, and of what
in German is called ‘The Theory of Form’ (Formenlehre)! I shall gladly
suggest to the teachers of composition at all the Conservatoires in Europe
and America to adopt your Paraphrases as a practical guide in their teaching.
From the very first page, the Variations II. and III. are true gems; and not
less the other numbers continuously, up to the grotesque Fugue and the
Cortège which crown the whole work gloriously.15
Liszt admired the Russians in particular for challenging the Germanic hege-
mony over matters of musical taste and style.
One of the most remarkable of Liszt’s late paraphrases is the setting of the
Sarabande and Chaconne from Handel’s Almira, composed in 1879 for his
pupil, the English pianist Walter Bache. This is the only setting of a baroque
piece dating from Liszt’s late period. His most recent baroque transcription
prior to Almira, dating from 1867, was of J. S. Bach’s Fantasie and Fugue in
G Minor BWV 542, which follows the original almost exactly. By contrast, in
the Sarabande and Chaconne, Liszt freely expands upon Handel’s original
pieces, adding introductory, transitional, and developmental material to
create a stately, stirring, highly unified work anticipating the grandeur of
Ferruccio Busoni’s late-romantic settings of Bach. Liszt’s decision to set
Handel probably reflects his aim to please the British audience, for whom
Handel was still the pre-eminent national composer.
The category of works based on music by other composers stands apart
from the other types of compositions of Liszt’s late period. With few excep-
tions, the transcriptions and paraphrases were published within a year of
composition, in marked contrast to compositions in other categories, which
Liszt often withheld from publication for years – if he chose to publish them
at all. This pattern suggests a practical reason why Liszt continued to com-
pose transcriptions and paraphrases: they were a primary source of income
in his later years.
2. Abstract compositions
The category of abstract compositions is markedly smaller than other groups
of compositions of the late period. It comprises five works without explicit
programmatic identification, one of which is the collection Five Little Piano
Pieces first published in its entirety in 1963. Nearly every item in this category
dates from 1873 or earlier, the only exceptions being the last two pieces of
the Five Little Pieces, composed in 1876 and 1879. It is impossible to give a
precise date for the Toccata, unpublished during Liszt’s lifetime, but it can
be assigned to the late period with assurance. The Toccata and the Technische
Studien written between 1868 and 1873 are the only works Liszt composed
during his later years specifically for the purpose of developing keyboard
technique. They are also in many cases studies in advanced harmony. The
Toccata, for instance, develops contrasts of major vs. minor and diatonic vs.
chromatic. It begins with an impressionistic wash of sound accomplished by
rapid figuration entirely on the white keys, attaining definition in C major at
104 James M. Baker
Example 5.5a Toccata, bars 1–20
bar 19 (see Ex. 5.5a). Debussy was to employ a similar effect in ‘Mouvement’,
the third of the Images, Book I (pub. 1905). The introduction of chromatics
leads to a central episode in E beginning in major mode in bar 43, but
switching to minor in bar 60. The Toccata ends a tritone away, in A minor –
the relative minor of the opening C major – expressed as a sixth-chord with
C in the bass (bar 65) and embellished with chromatic auxiliary sixth chords
of G and B minor (see Ex. 5.5b).
The Five Little Pieces is a collection of very small pieces that Liszt evidently
drew together as a presentation piece to Olga von Meyendorff, widow of a
Russian baron who moved to Weimar in 1871 with her four young sons and
became part of Liszt’s inner circle of friends and supporters. Meyendorff
held the manuscript copies of these pieces and did not allow their release
Example 5.5b Toccata, bars 65–94

106 James M. Baker
during her lifetime; she died in 1926. The first piece in the set, dating from
1865, is a simplified setting of the Notturno No. 2 published in 1850. The
second piece likewise dates from 1865. The third piece, composed in 1873,
starts out with a delicate texture based on parallel thirds and sixths in the
right hand alone. The fourth piece was composed three years later likely
as a companion piece to the third, since it corresponds closely in texture
throughout. The fifth piece, entitled ‘Sospiri!’, is the only piece of the set
with a special title, and is the most fully developed of the five pieces. It
presents a tender melodic fragment (hardly a full-fledged theme), marked
Dolce amoroso, in the key of A major (beginning in bar 11) followed by a
transition leading to its repetition down a step in the key of G (bar 16).
This entire passage is then repeated with variation in bars 37–62, followed
by a final section in which the thematic phrase is stated Dolcissimo in E
major (bar 63), F minor (bar 67), and F minor (bars 77–9). The latter
statement, marked Languendo appassionato, represents the parallel minor
of the odd harmonic region of G major encountered earlier. The closing
measures return to the vague diminished harmonies of the introduction,
and focus on the chromatic variance between A and A at the heart of the
harmonic structure of the piece. On another level, the harmonies featured
in this final piece of the set – harmonies rooted on A, F, and E – might
have been derived from the keys of the earlier pieces: E major (No. 1), A
major (No. 2), and F major (Nos. 3 and 4). It seems possible that the final
piece was written to justify drawing together various earlier pieces into a set
(even though it was evidently not a set he intended for publication). Of the
five pieces, the fifth is the only one to end with the fade-out on high-register
dissonant chords, a feature associated with the late style.
Liszt dedicated his Impromptu, first published in 1877, to Olga von
Meyendorff. He seldom used the title ‘Impromptu’, which may therefore
indicate the specific influence of Chopin. At one time Liszt had also called
this piece ‘Nocturne’, corroborating a Chopinesque concept. Composed in
the key of F major, this piece seems to allude to Chopin’s F Major Prelude,
op. 28. Liszt’s harmony in this work appears derived from an underlying
melodic motive, the chromatic ascent from the third to fifth scale degree:
A, B, B (C), C. Both works dedicated to Meyendorff convey a tender
sentiment quite frequently encountered in Liszt’s late works, usually in pieces
with a nocturnal ambiance such as cradle songs, often dedicated to close
friends still living. (Another example is ‘En rêve. Nocturne’, one of his last
pieces, written in late 1885 for his student August Stradal.)
The Fantasie and Fuge über das Thema B-A-C-H, composed in 1870
and published in 1871, is a holdover from his earlier style and is a type of
piece he did not compose thereafter. It probably should not be considered
a late-period work at all. It is based on Liszt’s composition for organ, the
Praeludium und Fuge über den Namen B-A-C-H composed in 1855–6 and
revised in 1869–70. He arranged the revised organ composition for piano
and published it with a slightly different title. Amongst the late works,
it is unique in its extended bombastic display and tremendous technical
demands.
3. Nationalistic and celebratory music

The category of Nationalistic and Celebratory Music reflects an important
aspect of Liszt’s career continuing until his death. It consists of twenty-
nine works of a festive or patriotic character, fifteen of which are associated
specifically with Hungary, including the set of seven Historical Hungarian
Portraits completed in 1885. The Hungarian works cluster in two timespans:
1870–3 and 1881–5. Liszt lived in Hungary for eight months in 1870, having
sought refuge there from the hostilities of the Franco-Prussian war. At that
time he began to accrue numerous recognitions as Hungary’s premier com-
poser, including an honorary appointment as Royal Councillor. His set-
tings of Five Hungarian Folksongs, based on arrangements by the elder
K. Ábrányi, are disarmingly simple and straightforward, reflecting a new
appreciation of the inherent beauty of native melodies.
Liszt was often called upon to provide festive music for state occasions.
In the early 1870s he wrote three marches and the Szózat und Ungarischer
Hymnus, a moving setting of the Hungarian national anthem preceded
by an arrangement of Béni Egressy’s music to Mihály Vörösmarty’s patri-
otic poem, ‘Szózat’ (‘Appeal’). The Ungarischer Geschwindmarsch, written
in 1870 at the request of a Hungarian publisher, is a good example of his
march style. It is simply and squarely structured and based on subject matter
familiar from the Hungarian music of Schubert and Brahms. The distinctive
aspect of Liszt’s march is the use of unusual scales together with the jux-
taposition of chromatically related harmonies. In bars 23–7, for example,
the half cadence to the dominant of A minor is prepared by a passage based
on the major raised mediant, a C major chord, but spelled most unusually
with an F, and supporting a melody that features many chromatic inter-
vals as well as pitches at odds with the underlying harmony, such as E (see
Ex. 5.6a). The bass progression in bars 26–7 reverses the melodic progres-
sion E–F, the head motive of the main theme (see bar 3). Other motivic
chromatic relations involve the juxtaposition of harmonies derived from
flat and sharp keys. This sort of contrast comes to the fore at the frenzied
conclusion, where a passage beginning in bar 114 emphasising an E har-
mony is transposed to the level of the tonic A major – at the distance of a
tritone – in the closing bars. The use of the mediant of A as a connecting
chord in bar 123 hardly lessens the jolt of the switch from flats to sharps
(see Ex. 5.6b).
108 James M. Baker
Example 5.6a Ungarischer Geschwindmarsch, bars 23–7
Example 5.6b Ungarischer Geschwindmarsch, bar 114 to end
After 1873, Liszt stopped writing music in the Hungarian style for a
number of years, but his interest in it resumed in 1881, the year that he
revisited his birthplace, Raiding (in western Hungary, now part of Austria),
after an absence of many years. Late in life Liszt discovered in his attempts to
write Hungarian music the impetus towards increased experimentation – as
Example 5.7a Csárdás macabre, bars 49–57
Example 5.7b Camille Saint-Saëns, Danse macabre, bars 655–65 (Liszt’s piano transcription)
if asserting his national identity provided the strength and sense of purpose
he needed to break away from the rules and limitations of Western Euro-
pean music. For the first time he now turned his attention to the native
dance idiom of the csárdás. On the cover of the manuscript of his Csárdás
macabre, composed in 1881–2, Liszt wrote, ‘May one write or listen to such a
thing?’ (‘Darf man solch ein Ding schreiben oder anhören?’) Although Liszt
wrote to his publisher Táborszky about the piece in March 1882, his doubts
evidently caused him ultimately to withhold it from publication. This work
reflects the influence of Saint-Saëns, whose Danse macabre Liszt admired
and transcribed.16 The rustic parallel fifths are in fact derived from that
work (compare the passage in bars 49–57 of the Csárdás with bars 655–65
of Liszt’s transcription of the Saint-Saëns; see Ex. 5.7a and 5.7b), but here
are used as main subject matter and with a vigour that anticipates the primi-
tivism of his Hungarian successor, Béla Bartók. The rollicking theme at bar
162 is identical with the beginning of the Hungarian popular folk-style tune
entitled ‘Ég a kunyhó, ropag a nád’ from the early 1800s, which happens
appropriately enough to contain in concealed fashion a tune which resem-
bles the Dies irae chant from the funeral mass.17 The Csárdás macabre is one
of Liszt’s bigger, more extroverted late compositions, displaying the same
110 James M. Baker
Figure 5.1 Liszt, Csárdás macabre, Form (harmonic functions expressed in terms
of D minor)
Introduction bars 1–48 arpeggiates F-A-C augmented triad (V or V/ iii?)

A 49–162 iii (bar 49); v (bar 89, bar 125)
B 163–252 V/III (bar 163); III (spelled as G , bar 191); V (bar 240)
B' 253–304
A' 305–418
B' 419–560 = B transposed down minor third; V (bar 419);
II (bar 447); V (bar 509)
transition 561–88 VI (bar 577); V (bar 586)
Coda 589–704 I (D major); touches upon iii (bar 633) and II (bar 667)
devilish virtuosity as his Mephisto works, and can be a real crowd-pleaser.

The surface grotesqueries belie a highly unified structure in the key of D,
outlined in Figure 5.1. It is striking that this ostensibly irrational composi-
tion is solidly based on procedures conventional to Liszt’s earlier style: focus
on various forms of the mediant with concomitant contrast of sharp and
flat key areas (F major, F minor, G major); an introduction based on a
symmetrical chord; the wholesale transposition of a large formal unit; and
the conclusion of a minor-mode piece in the major. The Csárdás macabre is
an object lesson that one should be wary of assigning such labels as ‘atonal’
to Liszt’s late works on the basis of strange sonorities at the surface of the
music.
In addition to several csárdás pieces, Liszt composed four Hungarian
Rhapsodies (nos. 16 through 19) from 1882 to 1885, working again in this
genre after having neglected it for nearly thirty years. Of the four, only the
nineteenth – one of his last completed works – has the variety, vivacity,
and sweep of the best of the earlier rhapsodies to make it very effective in
concert. Curiously, this rhapsody is based on themes taken from the work of
another composer (Ábrányi’s Csárdás nobles), whereas the sixteenth, seven-
teenth, and eighteenth rhapsodies are entirely original. These latter pieces
lack the full, balanced melodies of the traditional rhapsodies and suffer from
an almost mechanical sequencing of their limited subject matter. They do
build to the frenzied conclusion typical of the genre, but these endings can
nevertheless seem perfunctory and unconvincing (as is especially the case
in No. 17) – a flaw not uncommon in Liszt’s late-period works when he
attempted a big finish. The crowning masterwork of Liszt’s nationalistic
music is the set of Historic Hungarian Portraits (Historische Ungarische Bild-
nisse) completed in 1885. This work will be discussed at length in the next
chapter.
4. Sacred keyboard music

The sacred keyboard music is a very small group of pieces, the most substan-
tial of which were written mainly around 1877–9: two Ave Marias, Sancta
Dorothea, simple harmonisations of twelve traditional chorale tunes, the

Prelude and Hymn of St Francis, In domum Domini ibimus, and the Via
Crucis. The only two pieces in the group clearly intended for keyboard are
Sancta Dorothea, a slight, delicate piece, and In festo transfigurationis Domini
nostri Jesu Christi of 1880, which seems more like an episode from a larger
work (e.g. the first of the Cypress pieces from Années, Book III) than a
composition unto itself. It is a brief musical representation of the trans-
figuration of Jesus – evidently a spontaneous inspiration composed on the
feast of the transfiguration, 6 August 1880. The composition co-ordinates
a modulatory sequence – from G major through E major and F minor con-
cluding in F major – with a gradual shift in register, rising from the depths
to heavenly heights at the end, creating a sense of floating off into space.
The remainder of the sacred piano works are arranged from vocal music.
The Ave Maria in D, published in 1873, is Liszt’s expansive paraphrase of
his own choral work from 1869, along the lines of his setting of Schubert’s
Ave Maria, in which the melodic line is bathed in arpeggios. Liszt’s melody
has a naive charm, but is marred by an unnatural modulation to V(bar 21)
and the portentous, rather strange modulation afterwards to the mediant
(bar 35). Such odd digressions are rather frequently encountered in Liszt’s
late music, reflecting, it would seem, his propensity to let his mind roam
free. The second Ave Maria in G major is so slight as to seem lacking in an
identifying idea.
The Prelude and Hymn of St Francis, an arrangement from 1881 of a work
originally composed in 1862 for baritone, male chorus, orchestra and organ,
might well work as a big choral piece, but it certainly does not as a piece
for solo piano. It seems overly repetitive and the main rhythmic motive,
a rather buoyant and heavy-handed waltz figure, becomes tedious in the
extreme. The contrast between vocal and instrumental sonorities might be
the only means of alleviating the monotony of this composition. In domum
Domini ibimus is a transcription of the prelude to a larger work, a setting
of Psalm 121 for mixed choir, organ, brass, and percussion. It would serve
admirably in that context, but is not idiomatic enough for keyboard to work
satisfactorily as a performance piece. In the keyboard version the gestures
come across as simplistic and bombastic.
Liszt’s chorale settings are little gems, although more suitable for study
than performance. Yet he occasionally departs from strict four-part writ-
ing for orchestral effects (e.g. in the second phrase of ‘O Lamm Gottes!’),
indicating that he intended that these settings be played. The hymn ‘Vexilla
Regis’ stands out as quite different from the other tunes, all German, that
Liszt chose to set. He was fond of this Latin hymn and set it several times.
This arrangement is interesting especially for its changes from quadruple to
triple metre.
112 James M. Baker
In general, the most interesting aspect of Liszt’s sacred piano music

(true as well of the sacred music in general) is that it remained unpublished
during his lifetime. This music originated from a deep spiritual impulse that
demanded expression, but of a kind that Liszt himself recognised was not
suited to general consumption. In July 1885 he wrote to Princess Carolyne:
My Via Crucis and Septem Sacramenta, plus the Rosario, will not be
published by Pustet of Regensburg, the Catholic publisher I wanted. He has
declined politely, very much to my chagrin – finding that the compass of
these works exceeded that of his numerous usual publications. Another and
worse reason lies at the root of it – my works in this field do not sell, which
will not prevent me from doing justice to those of Witt, Haberl, et al., and
from contributing as well as I can to promoting the German Society of St
Cecilia. In certain cases my rule remains: ‘As you will do, I shall not do.’18
The Via Crucis is the product of Liszt’s arduous spiritual quest and one of
his most daring and original conceptions. This work is based on the Roman
Catholic ceremony performed on Good Friday commemorating the pas-
sion and death of Jesus, depicted in fourteen stations. Although ostensibly
an arrangement of a choral composition, the solo keyboard version of Via
Crucis was in all likelihood intended to be performed and warrants full con-
sideration by any pianist interested in programming the late works. Audi-
ences attuned to the meditative piano cycles of Hindemith and Messiaen
will respond to the dramatic cyclic design. This strange and profound work
should put to rest any doubts as to the sincerity and depth of Liszt’s religious
convictions.19
5. Music of premonition, death, and mourning

Liszt’s music of premonition, death, and mourning is a small but impor-
tant collection of thirteen individual pieces, including the two versions of
La lugubre gondola. Book III of Années contains several pieces that could
properly be assigned to this category as well, and the entire Via Crucis and
Historical Hungarian Portraits (which contain revised versions of two pieces
in this category) could rightly be considered works of mourning. As has
been discussed, Liszt was deeply affected by the deaths of friends and loved
ones throughout his life, and these losses had a profound impact on the
types of compositions he chose to write. Our survey of diverse categories of
works shows clearly, however, that he never permitted himself to lapse into
abject depression for very long. The great cyclic collections of his late years
reflect in particular his attempt to cope with loss and to place his fears and
doubts within a larger spiritual perspective.
Like the sacred music, Liszt’s works that contemplate death originated
from a deep inner impulse, and he usually did not seek their publication.
Many of these works are among the strangest of his creations, impeding their
general accessibility. It is not surprising that this sort of expression is found

primarily in music for solo piano. The 1870s saw the creation of a number
of elegies written in association with the deaths of particular individuals
(including, as I have argued, the late version of ‘Die Zelle in Nonnenwerth’).
Soon after his disastrous fall down the staircase at the Hofgärtnerei in July
1881, he wrote two pieces that in effect define a new subgenre expressing
deep personal anxiety and pessimism (as opposed to the elegiac works he
had written up to this point): Trübe Wolken and Unstern! Sinistre, disastro.
In December 1882 and January 1883 he produced the two versions of La
lugubre gondola, premonitions of the death of Richard Wagner in Venice in
February 1883. (Since Liszt was then staying in Venice with the Wagners in
the Palazzo Vendramin during which time Wagner was clearly failing, the
appearance of these works seems less eerily coincidental.) Liszt composed
two pieces, R. W. – Venezia and Am Grabe Richard Wagners, within several
months of Wagner’s death, in tribute to the composer. R. W. – Venezia
depicts Wagner as hero through a sequence of fanfares, but climaxing on
a terrifying augmented chord. Am Grabe Richard Wagners was written on
22 May 1883, Wagner’s birthday. It features a motive first used by Liszt
in the prelude to The Bells of Strasbourg and later borrowed by Wagner
for the sacrament motive of Parsifal. This piece paints a beatific vision of
the composer, in fact employing a modulatory registral strategy similar
to that of In festo transfigurationis Domini nostri Jesu Christi, perhaps an
unintentional indicator of the depth of Liszt’s devotion to Wagner! Both
pieces end in the heavenly region of keys with many sharps: F major for In
festo transfigurationis, a less certain key (either F or C major) for Am Grabe.
While In festo transfigurationis concludes in the highest register, however,
Am Grabe returns to the middle register at the end, perhaps in recognition
of the earthly repose of Wagner’s remains.
As has been stated, the music of premonition, death, and mourning
has received an exceptional amount of attention in the analytical literature,
no doubt because many features seem to break away from the conventions
of tonality.20 For purposes of enumerating features associated with this
category, we shall focus on a piece less frequently discussed – Schlaflos!
Frage und Antwort (Sleepless! Question and Answer). This work was written
in March 1883, the troubled period just after Wagner’s death. Subtitled
‘Nocturne’, it was inspired by a poem, now lost, by Antonia Raab, an Austrian
student of Liszt. Like the other pieces from this period, this work was not
published during Liszt’s lifetime. This piece is especially useful to analyse
because it exists in two versions – one that, among other differences, ends
monophonically, the other concluding with full chords. (The second version
is given in ‘ossia’s in the original source.)
As with certain other works of mourning (such as Unstern!), this com-
position is in two parts. What is unusual is the agitated tempo of the first
114 James M. Baker
part, marked Schnell und leidenschaftlich, which evokes the swirling chaos
of the beginnings of certain works of Schumann, such as the Fantasie, op.
17 or the Kreisleriana. The first part, which might represent the turmoil of
a questioning mind, is solidly in E minor. Although the composition opens
in medias res with G2 in the bass, the bass soon descends chromatically to
E2, maintained as a pedal point until the transition at bar 42. A transition
is effected by a single line in middle register sounding the motive from the
opening of the piece. The replacement of G by G in bars 43–5 signifies the
change of mode from minor to major within the key of E.
The second part of Schlaflos! answers the anxious questioning of the
first with a peaceful chorale-like ‘Andante quieto’ in E major that starts in
the high register and then sequences down to the middle register of the
transitional passage. The primary version of the work ends with the single
line of the transition trailing off with a descending arpeggiation of a C
minor chord. Out of context one might well analyse the piece as having
modulated to the relative minor. The full harmony of the alternate version,
given as an ‘ossia’, would indicate that hearing the piece end in C minor
might not have been Liszt’s intent. The ‘ossia’ restores the bass pedal on E2
in the concluding measures, providing a secure link with the first half, and
indicating that the work might be understood as projecting the key of E
throughout. More generally, the specific means that Liszt employs here to
project the key of E may be usefully compared with those of other pieces in
this key, especially compositions from the late period.
According to Alan Walker, E major is Liszt’s religious key.21 This is a
simplification which cannot help us in attempting a close analysis of an
individual piece. E major, to be sure, has strong religious connotations in
many works. It can often convey a pentecostal religious ardour, as in ‘Sursum
corda’, the final piece of Années de pèlerinage, Book III. But there are other
keys that for Liszt bore other kinds of religious connotations – for instance
F major, which appears to convey heavenly bliss in such works as In festo
transfigurationis. The key of E has more specifically to do with transcendental
passion – whether spiritual or temporal – than with religion in a general
sense. There seem to have been in Liszt’s mind subliminal connections
between the fervour of ‘Sursum corda’, the erotic transports of the Sonetto
104 del Petrarca, and the ecstatic transcendence of ‘Vallée d’Obermann’, all
of which are in E major. On the other hand, E major used in the context of
the pastoral style could convey naive, angelic bliss, as in the ‘Angelus!’ that
opens Book III of Années. Understanding the gestures that one encounters
in other works in the key of E major can shed light on the meaning of
a refractory late work such as Schlaflos! The upward-reaching phrases in
right-hand octaves over the tonic E pedal closely resemble the gestures of
‘Sursum corda’ both in compositional technique and mood. Since the topic
of the latter piece is spiritual struggle, one can easily infer that the turmoil
of the first part of Schlaflos! involves an existential angst. The lack of closure
at the end of the main version of the piece introduces a sense of drifting
without definitive resolution, as is appropriate in the situation of a troubled
soul seeking answers to life’s big questions. (Liszt might have done well to
choose a less assured title, such as that of Ives’s Unanswered Question, which
actually creates a similar drifting sensation.) The meaning of trailing off
into the relative minor at the end is also apparently intentionally vague. The
ending of the aforementioned ‘Angelus!’ from Années, Book III provides a
useful basis for comparison. This piece closes with a single voice trailing
off in middle register. The context here leaves no doubt as to the key of E.
However, in the course of the meandering sequential progression leading to
this close, the area of the relative minor is touched upon (bars 244–5). The
effect here – in particular of the B leading to C – is to introduce a shadow
of doubt into the otherwise pristine diatonic bliss of the major mode. In bars
65 and 67 of Schlaflos! a B creeps in with similar effect. The difference here
is that whereas in ‘Angelus!’ the diatonic order is restored at the conclusion,
Schlaflos! ends without clear harmonic definition of either E major or C
minor.
A brief comparison of pitch relations in the two versions of Schlaflos!
points to a common purpose underlying the distinctly different settings.
In both versions of Part I the upper voice pushes up chromatically to D6,
the leading tone, which resolves to E6 in bar 50 at the beginning of the
chorale. At the end of Part II, the main version touches upon D4 in bars
64 and 66, which is then allowed a taste of resolution to E4 in bar 68,
the highpoint of a melodic contour. Tonality is certainly obscured by the
C4 in the penultimate bar, from which the melody leaps down a fourth
to G3. All of this occurs without bass support. Note, however, that the
last bass note in the main version is E3 in bar 60, whose status as tonic
is obscured, of course, by the presence of C3 in the tenor and the weak
apparent cadence in the key of C minor in bar 61. The use of sequences
also tends to disorient the listener. The close of the alternate version places
a low-register homophonic texture above the same E2 pedal that supported
the first half of the piece. In this context, the upper voice can afford to be
more vague than in the main version. So the D4 in bar 71 of this version
does not progress to E4, but rather descends through C4 (bar 72) to B3.
In fact, both versions of the composition experiment with denial of closure,
but withhold it in two different ways: closure is lacking primarily in the bass
in version 1 and in the melody in version 2. Walker considers version 2 an
inferior composition written ‘for the faint-hearted’ who cannot abide the
insecurity of the indefinite close of the main version.22 Be that as it may,
it is nevertheless important to gauge closure for both versions within the
116 James M. Baker
context of E major, whose status as tonic is not seriously jeopardised by the

monophonic conclusion of the first version. This conclusion is suggestive
of key change, but does not secure a genuine modulation. This analysis is
offered as a guide to hearing and interpreting the many instances in Liszt’s
late music of pieces trailing off without closure. In most cases one may infer
a single tonal centre against which the tendencies of various scale degrees
may be traced in a number of voices. It should be remembered that a voice
situated in the middle register is still used in the traditional sense, and lacks
the harmony-defining power of the bass.
6. Programmatic works
The sixth and final category of Liszt’s late piano music is the programmatic
works, as signified by compositions with special, non-generic titles. It thus
includes the four Valses oubliées, but does not include the Impromptu of
1872. In point of fact, nearly all of Liszt’s compositions arose from pro-
grammatic associations, so this category is hardly exclusive. Unstern! could
certainly be considered a programmatic work, for example, but may more
usefully be placed in a more restrictive category. Only the works in the
category of abstract music ostensibly lack programmatic associations, even
though in individual cases they differ but little from programmatic pieces.
The final category therefore includes the Mephisto dances; two cradle songs;
the piano version of the symphonic poem Von der Wiege bis zum Grabe; a
Romance oubliée and four Valses oubliées; the melodrama Der blinde Sänger;
two small speciality pieces, Carrousel de Mme. P and the Bagatelle ohne
Tonart; and, most important, two large cyclic collections, Weihnachtsbaum
and Années de pèlerinage, Book III. These works are primarily products of
the years following 1876, many after the pivotal year of 1881. Contrary to the
general reputation of Liszt’s late music as gloomy and austere, the pieces in
this category generally feature one or more of the attributes associated with
his earlier style: diabolical energy, brilliant effects of vertiginous dancing,
ardent passion, and tender nostalgia.
The famous Bagatelle ohne Tonart well represents the last category. This
piece is certainly one of Liszt’s more adventurous experimental attempts to
push beyond the bounds of tonality. The title by which this piece is generally
known actually appears as a subtitle on the front page of the manuscript
beneath the title Vierter Mephisto Waltz. We know therefore that it cannot
have been composed before the Third Mephisto Waltz dating from the latter
half of 1883, and it may well have been written as late as 1885. In March
1885 Liszt in fact wrote another piece bearing the title ‘Fourth Mephisto
Waltz’, left apparently unfinished at the time of his death. The ‘ohne Tonart’
waltz may therefore have been intended to replace the unfinished one.
Example 5.8a Bagatelle ohne Tonart, bars 1–22
This work is a delightful, glitzy waltz, full of both wit and passion, and
makes an excellent effect with an audience. It is in a typical sectionalised
dance form, with repeated sections receiving brilliant variation. Whether
the piece succeeds in escaping the force of gravitation to a tonal centre
as its subtitle indicates is doubtful. One might analyse the work as being
built around a symmetrical chord – the G diminished-seventh chord with
which the piece ends. Certainly, the B–F tritone representing Mephistophe-
les featured in the monophonic introduction belongs to this chord (see
Ex. 5.8a), as do important elements of the bass line of the work, including
D3 (bar 13), D2 (bar 63), F3 (bar 79), as well as A4 and the pitches of
the right-hand chord in bar 95, etc. From another point of view, however,
the underpinnings of the various sections of the piece – the main bass ele-
ments and melodic notes – work together to imply an underlying tonality
of D. The main theme, marked Scherzando, beginning in bar 13 (Ex. 5.8a),
over D3 in the bass, alternates F and F as primary elements, suggesting
the traditional oscillation between minor and major modes. In the con-
sequent phrase of this theme, the main elements of the melody, E and A,
combine with C3 in the bass to project the dominant that would conven-
tionally occur here. The dominant is clearly projected in the monophonic
118 James M. Baker
Example 5.8b Bagatelle ohne Tonart, bars 57–85
transition in bars 53–6. The wonderful contrasting appassionato section

(bars 57–85) employs a bass line – C2-D2-E2-E2-F2 – that conforms with
a standard tonal progression in D minor: V6/5-i-i6 (see Ex. 5.8b). Moreover,
the motivic correspondence between this bass line and the unaccompanied
local-level melodic gesture of the introduction (bars 10–12) strengthens
the significance of D as a centre overriding sectional contrasts. After intro-
ducing the two main subjects, the piece breaks off, then launches into a
brief cadenza that projects the G diminished-seventh chord, followed by
a return of the introductory material. The second half of the piece consists
of a slightly expanded repetition of the first half, with glittering variations –
for the most part based on the original harmonic underpinning. The piece
concludes with a dissonant codetta sequencing diminished-seventh chords
to unfold the underlying G diminished-seventh. Of the four pitches of this
chord, the two by far most frequently encountered in structurally prominent
positions are D and F, which – together with their ancillary pitches C, E,
and A that form the dominant – tend to project D as tonal centre fairly
strongly. The fact that the other Vierter Mephisto Waltz – the one which Liszt
may have intended to replace with the Bagatelle ohne Tonart – is definitively
in D major adds persuasive confirmation of this analysis. The correspon-

dence of keys between the alternative pieces possibly offers corroboration
for the Bagatelle ohne Tonart having been written in 1885, after the other
Vierter Mephisto Waltz.
In spite of ailing body and spirit, Franz Liszt continued courageously to

compose until the end of his life. He often was compelled to write music
that he knew was strange and for which he could not expect to find a
publisher or to gain much of an audience. The music that meant the most
to him in his later years emerged as brief, intense expressions that left him
drained both physically and emotionally. He might have lost the ability
to control large spans of musical time, as his inability to complete the St
Stanislaus oratorio would seem to indicate, but in his later years he com-
posed more than simple, short pieces, as some would have it. He turned
instead to cyclical forms in which brief, highly expressive components would
be placed in a carefully designed sequence to create a unity far greater than
the sum of the individual pieces. The Années de pèlerinage, Book III, the Via
Crucis, and the Historical Hungarian Portraits are the three largest and most
substantial works of Liszt’s old age. No mere collections of character pieces,
these works are grand and challenging conceptions in which the composer
examines his past life, confronts death, and looks ahead to the life of the
world to come. These late cyclical compositions are the focus of the chapter
that follows.
6 Liszt’s late piano works: larger forms
ja m e s m . ba ke r
Nearly all of the compositions that Franz Liszt wrote later in life were smaller
pieces, as opposed to the Faust Symphony, Piano Sonata, and oratorios that
crowned his middle period. One might gather that by his later years Liszt
had lost the mental acuity and creative energy to complete big projects.
He certainly had suffered a crisis of confidence as he approached old age.
Yet three collections of keyboard pieces written in his later years exhibit
such substance and scope that they fully warrant consideration as major
works on a par with his earlier acknowledged masterworks. These collec-
tions, Via Crucis, Historische Ungarische Bildnisse, and Années de pèlerinage,
troisième année, all exhibit complex cyclic concepts carrying forward Liszt’s
work in three important categories: sacred, nationalistic, and programmatic
music.
Via Crucis
The Via Crucis is unique among Liszt’s larger late keyboard works. The
question arises whether it ought to be considered a keyboard work at all.
In many cases throughout his career it seems as if Liszt’s compositional
concepts were not wedded to a particular medium. He was in the habit of
composing versions of a composition simultaneously for various media; in
certain cases, no single version necessarily claims priority over the others –
and the Via Crucis may be one of these cases. Liszt, being the pre-eminent
producer of keyboard arrangements of large orchestral works, could have
written the keyboard version of Via Crucis simply for the purpose of dis-
seminating the music for individual study and appreciation (as was the case
with his transcriptions of much of the symphonic repertoire of the time);
such arrangements were a major source of income. But this seems not to be
the case for many of the late pieces with versions for various media, because
he seldom sought their publication. Liszt always valued having music actu-
ally performed over faithfulness to a particular medium. Even in the case
of music with text, he seemed to conceive of the music as a viable entity
on its own, unattached to a particular instrumental setting. Of his plans
for the Via Crucis, he wrote in 1878: ‘I will publish them first for piano (or
[120] organ) for four hands.’1 When he finally submitted the work to a publisher
121 Larger forms in the late piano works
in 1884, however, he sent the choral version, along with two other choral
works. Shamefully, the publisher rejected the entire submission, deeming
the works unmarketable.2
The Via Crucis is actually very effective as a solo keyboard piece. Unbe-
knownst to Liszt, he was creating a sacred equivalent to Mussorgsky’s Pictures
at an Exhibition (composed 1874) at roughly the same time. Both compo-
sitions represent an innovative formal concept, starting with a processional
and depicting the onlooker’s responses to a series of images hanging on the
walls of church or gallery. Audiences attuned to the serious piano medi-
tations of Hindemith and Messiaen will respond readily to the dramatic
cyclical design of Via Crucis, full of tender devotion and pathos.
We know that Liszt had formulated the project of Via Crucis as early
as 1873, for on the first of January 1874 he wrote to Princess Carolyne Zu
Sayn-Wittgenstein, his mistress and confidante since the 1840s:
In your last letter you again speak of my Christbaum. I hope to publish it by

next Christmas – and also the other little work of which I have for long been
thinking: Via Crucis. I shall need only 6 weeks of outer tranquillity to finish
writing both of them. They will by no means be works of learning, or of
display, but simple echoes of the emotions of my youth – these remain
indelible through all the trials of the years!3
It is interesting that he originally paired the piece in his mind with his Weih-
nachtsbaum cycle (published 1882). (For reasons of space, this delightful
collection of music associated with Christmas – a kind of combination of
Kinderszenen and the Nutcracker – cannot be discussed in this chapter.)
Together the Via Crucis and Weihnachtsbaum were evidently intended to
portray religious and secular aspects of his youth. He ended up completing
neither project speedily, perhaps because the emotional associations he was
working out proved to be much more complex than he had expected. The
Via Crucis took on a life of its own, and Liszt was unable to get much done
on the project until the fall of 1878, when he composed the bulk of it and
brought it to completion in the space of a few weeks:
These last two weeks I have been completely absorbed in my Via Crucis. It is
at last complete . . . and I still feel quite shaken by it. Day after tomorrow I
will go back to writing letters, a task impossible for me to undertake so long
as music torments my brain. I am barely able to keep up a few indispensable
though brief conversations during pauses in my work; and in the evening I
feel very tired. I go to bed at 9:30 and read for another half an hour; then the
wretched notes of the morning and of the day to come enter my mind and
disturb my slumber. In music as in moral matters one rarely does the good
one would wish, but often the evil which one would not wish.4
122 James M. Baker
It would seem that Liszt himself did not fully anticipate the depth of the
feelings he would confront when contemplating the passion and death of
Jesus, and the struggle it would take to complete his vision.
The following is a brief outline of the Via Crucis, with special attention
to motivic features that lend unity to the cycle:
‘Vexilla Regis.’ Via Crucis opens with a setting of the hymn composed by
Venantius Fortunatus (c. 530–609) for the installation of the relics of the
Holy Cross at the cathedral in Poitiers in 569. This hymn, a personal favorite
that Liszt set on several occasions, creates an air of pageantry: ‘The royal
banners forward go, the Cross shines forth in mystic glow.’5
The setting here is notable for its rhythmic swing and alternation of uni-
son phrases with four-part homophony. It is written in a fairly strict Dorian
(often using B) but E is introduced to avoid tritones with B. A diminished-
seventh chord occurs uniquely to set the phrase ‘spes unica’ (‘only hope’),
perhaps signalling the chromatic migrations of the close. A touching dolcis-
simo phrase in G major (‘Piis adauge gratiam’) is followed by modal shift to
F minor (‘Reisque dele crimina’). The final amen occurs in D major, turning
the previously encountered F to good use. After the opening, depicting the
procession of the populace, the chromatic conclusion seems to turn inward
to reveal the subtle emotions of the individual engaged in this meditation.
Station I: Jesus is condemned to death. The triple octaves at the opening
allude to the ‘Vexilla Regis’ but receive the response of the clashing minor-
seventh chord (bar 3), which features the E and B chromatics from the
opening number. The music works in agitated fashion to displace these
elements with their diatonic counterparts, E and B (see bars 6 and 21–5).
The B brings about the ‘devil in music’, the B–F tritone lurking beneath the
surface, as in the contour in bars 16–17, which is encountered face-to-face
in bar 19.
Station II: Jesus takes up the cross. The pitch B is the common tone for
harmonies in this number: V/E (continuing from Station I), the climactic
E augmented chord in bar 12, the G augmented chord associated with
a plodding motive (bar 18), and the concluding B minor 6/4 chord. The
upper voice in bars 18–22 sounds for the first time an important chromatic
turning motive: D–E–C–D.
Station III: Jesus falls for the first time. Here the focus is on an F dimin-
ished chord, which subsides to an F minor chord (the latter having been
foreshadowed toward the end of ‘Vexilla Regis’, bars 71–7). The latter part of
this number is a beautiful setting of the first verse of the Stabat Mater, first
in simple parallel thirds, then parallel sixth chords. The key here is A major,
the relative major of F minor. This verse actually anticipates the subject of
the next station.
Station IV: Jesus meets his mother. Wrenching harmony supports an

ascending chromatic line in the first half, culminating in a tender high-
register dolcissimo passage in the second half. The harmony of this latter
section begins in B major (bar 18) but sequences down chromatically,
reaching A major in bar 26. This harmony is then converted to A minor
(bar 30) before trailing off to a diminished chord retaining the C. This very
tender music depicts Mary’s acceptance of the fate of her son. The structure
of the first half may be understood as essentially rooted on an F pedal (bars 1,
11, 14) which supports a B minor 6/4 before switching to the major mode in
the second half. The wrenching chord in bar 1 results from the combination
of the F pedal – the dominant of B – and the diminished-seventh chord
above: G–B–D–E (the E displaced temporarily by a D appoggiatura).
The chromatic turning motive appears in bar 3 and corresponding later
measures, this time – perhaps not accidentally – at the pitch level that yields
the retrograde of B–A–C–H.
Station V: Simon the Cyrenian helps Jesus carry his cross. Fittingly, the
plodding music from Station II, formerly in G, is now taken up in the estab-
lished key of A (bar 36f.), the rise in pitch level creating a sense of forward
momentum. The first half presents a freely composed chordal accompani-
ment in impassioned syncopated rhythm, beneath a slowly moving melody
(D–F–E–D–B) sequenced up a tritone in bars 14–21 (G–B–A–G–E). The
crucial melodic highpoints of these phrases form the tritone B–E. Another
tritone, B–E, is outlined in bars 1–2, occurring as well in the last chord
before the key change (bar 24) as B–F, and again at the end (bars 51–2).
Station VI: Saint Veronica. This station begins with two phrases that
outline the B–F tritone. A third phrase includes an explicit statement of
the B–A–C–H motive in prime form (bars 5–6). The introductory passage
culminates with the arpeggiation of the diminished-seventh chord con-
taining the B–F tritone, with G as root. This chord leads to the key of A
minor, in which key Liszt’s beautiful setting of ‘O Haupt voll Blut und Wun-
den’ is offered as a communal meditation on the experience of Veronica,
who wiped the wounded thorn-crowned face of Jesus. The G diminished-
seventh chord occurs again as the climax of the brief postlude.
Station VII: Jesus falls for the second time. This number follows Station
III almost exactly, transposed up one semitone to B to create a sense of
forward momentum.
Station VIII: The women of Jerusalem. Surely one of the most affecting of
the stations, this number begins with the parallel thirds and sixths associated
with the Stabat Mater, now in the context of harmonies elaborating under-
lying diminished-seventh chords. The first eight measures are built upon an
F diminished-seventh chord (see especially the chords of resolution in bars
4 and 8). Thereafter a pedal on B is established, supporting phrases in upper
124 James M. Baker
parts in which diminished-seventh chords on F, G, and A are sequenced.

The diminished-seventh chord on A is stated three times, the third time at
the climax in bar 17, still over the pedal B. This form of the chord is the last
available, indicating an exhaustive exploitation of the diminished-seventh
chord as the basis for the progression. The G–C tritone is featured in the
setting of Jesus’s command: ‘Weep not for me.’ This number concludes with
a fanfare passage on a pedal E. Incorporated here are a number of triadic
harmonies spelled to downplay their consonance (e.g. an A minor chord
is spelled A–B–E). The original form of the diminished-seventh chord on
F appears over the E pedal at the conclusion.
Station IX: Jesus falls the third time. This station follows its predecessors
(Stations III and VII) only loosely. Although it is given the key signature of
four flats, the Stabat Mater is in the key of B minor and different from the
two previous settings, with the inner voice down a sixth from the melody. The
ending is ambiguous but suggestive of a modulation to F minor, explaining
the key signature. The first half of this station is up a minor third from
Station VII; the B minor second half essentially maintains the key centre
of that station, but with a change of mode.
Station X: Jesus is stripped of his vestments. This station retains the key
signature of the latter part of Station IX, but begins definitively in F minor.
By bar 6, however, harmony has modulated to B minor. The bass B then
moves up to B, at the distance of a tritone from F. Thus the evil F–B tritone
lurks beneath the structure of this station, which ends on B in a whole-tone
context.
Station XI: Jesus is nailed to the cross. This number is in the key of C
minor, with the dominant G in the bass. The sharps here might have icono-
graphic significance, associated with nails or thorns. The melody, which
would be sung by men’s voices in the choral version, presumably ought to
be played Molto marcato by the pianist. The D in bar 9 is ostensibly a reso-
lution of C, but forms a tritone with the G pedal at the moment Jesus is
hung on the cross. The final melodic ascent to B seems to respond to the
descending whole-tone gesture that concludes Station X with B, perhaps
providing a resolution for that pitch. (Such a resolution would reciprocate
the opening from B to B that occurred in Station II.)
Station XII: Jesus dies on the cross. This station begins with Jesus’s cry
(‘Eli, eli . . .’), based on the G–D tritone from the previous station. This
interval underlies the second line of Christ’s recitative (bar 12) as well. The
lamenting progression in bars 2–11 unfolds the D octave in the upper voice,
harmonised primarily by augmented triads, but ending with a diminished
chord featuring the B–F tritone, along with D. (The exceptional harmonies
highlight A, adding emphasis to the tritone of D.)
This station is by far the weightiest. It concludes with Liszt’s wrenching

harmonisation of ‘O Traurigkeit, O Herzeleid!’ in the key of G minor. He
does not allow a perfect cadence at the end, however, but rather concludes
with bass descending C–B–B, allowing the devilish B to resolve to the
consonant B. The interlude at bar 13 (Andante non troppo lento – Dolce)
hovers between A major and F minor. Thus the preceding D–G tritone
seems to function as dominant of an A centre. The melodic motive at bar
13 (and bar 48) is the ‘Ave Crux’ motive from Station II (bar 14). Beginning
in bar 21 a sequential progression leads to a big C pedal, the dominant of
F minor. With Jesus’s words ‘Consummatum est’ (bar 38), however, the
progression retreats to A major, and this key centre is maintained through
bar 60. A transition then leads to the chorale in G minor.
Station XIII: Jesus is taken down from the cross. Station XIII begins with
a sequential solo line in G Dorian, serving as a transition to a statement of the
Stabat Mater in G major. The chromatic play at the beginning focuses on
the change from E to E. At bar 25, the E–C third of bars 23–4 is subsumed
into the trenchant opening chord of Station IV, whereupon the entire music
of that station is restated at the original pitch level and only slightly varied,
painting a vivid picture of the pietà. The station closes as Veronica arrives
to assist Mary, depicted by material derived from the opening of Station VI
(bar 58). The crucial pitch relation here is B vs. B. As in Station VI the
Veronica motive begins by outlining the F–B tritone. Here, however, this
motive receives a melodic response outlining the B triad, resonating with
the key at the beginning of the dolcissimo passage.
Station XIV: Jesus is placed in the sepulchre. The final station is firmly
grounded in D, reciprocal with the opening movement, ‘Vexilla Regis’. In
keeping with the tone of the scripture, the opening is quiet and monophonic,
but is based on the ‘Vexilla Regis’ hymn. Preparing the entry of the hymn
tune, the piano takes up offbeat left-hand chords, only adding the true bass
part after the first line of text has been completed. This accompaniment
has a quality of quiet motion which subtly complements the syncopations
in the tune. The ‘Amen’ is heard in a single voice (a solo mezzo-soprano
in the vocal version), echoed by a homophonic setting immediately there-
after. A monophonic transition (reminiscent of the conclusions of Stations
XI and XIII) leads into the closing dolcissimo section in D major, derived
from the dolcissimo material in the same key concluding Station IV and
associated with the Blessed Mother. The crucial difference is that here the
heavenly high-register chords receive a full arpeggiated accompaniment in
the low bass, signifying perhaps the earthly repose of Jesus’s body. The
progression trails off on an F minor chord (bars 77–81), associated with
death and mourning. (A full cadence on F minor had been expected but
126 James M. Baker
denied in Station XII with the ‘Consummatum est’.) The ‘Ave Crux’ then
occurs in conjunction with a descending F minor triad in bare octaves,
unaccompanied. Lingering further on F, a resolution is achieved only with
the unaccompanied D octave occurring with the last word, ‘Crux’. The piece
ends gravely with the ‘Ave Crux’ used as a cadential gesture in bare triple
octaves: A–B–D.
The Via Crucis possesses a complex cyclical structure unified on a variety
of levels through precisely controlled motives and pitch relations, many of
which take on an iconographic significance. It is impossible to do full justice
to this composition in this limited space, but a few summary comments
will perhaps convey the sophistication of Liszt’s conception. The piece is
grounded in a D tonality, probably stemming from the Dorian church mode;
the first and last numbers are in that key. The most critical pitch relation
appears to be the dichotomy between B and B, invoking the distinction
between the hard and soft hexachords of the modal system. B is in turn
often implicated in the B–F tritone, the age-old symbol of evil. The sequence
of keys of the stations reflects a certain functional logic. Station III is in A
major, the dominant, which recurs in Stations VI and XII. The central
stations, from Stations III through XII, are in keys that generally hover
about the dominant (Stations IV, VII, and IX are in B, for instance). Most
critically, two stations are at the distance of a tritone from the tonic: Station
V in A major and Station XI situated on a G pedal. These keys may
signify impending doom, for Station V features the heightened tension of
the plodding theme taken up a semitone from its original occurrence in
Station II, and Station XI depicts Jesus being nailed to the cross. Station XII,
that of Jesus’s death, begins with his cries on the D–G tritone, bringing
utmost tension at this critical moment. This strange and profound work
should silence those who cast doubt on the sincerity of Liszt’s religious
beliefs. It is the product of deep, anguished contemplation of the passion of
Jesus, a process during which one can well imagine Liszt came to identify
strongly with the suffering Christ. Via Crucis conveys not only the horror and
sorrow of the crucifixion, but also the wonder of God’s redeeming love for
humankind.
The Historical Hungarian Portraits

The Historical Hungarian Portraits is Liszt’s great cyclic composition in the
nationalist genre. This work, although ostensibly completed in 1885, was
not published during his lifetime. In June 1885 Liszt wrote to his publisher
Taborszky:
You will receive at the beginning of July some short Hungarian pianoforte
pieces, which I shall orchestrate later on, entitled
To the memory of
Stephan Széchényi
Franz Deak
Josef Eötvös
Ladislas Telek
Michael Vörösmarti
Alexander Petöfi.
The last piece has already been published by Taborszky, but must have a
few more concluding bars in the new edition.
Mosonyi’s Trauerklänge (Mosonyi’s funeral music), which you have
already had by you for fifteen years, shall make No. 7. Our friend Mosonyi,
so excellent and full of character, and so pre-eminent a musician, must also
not be forgotten.6
Probably because of his failing eyesight and general decline in health, Liszt
never got around to orchestrating these pieces, nor did he see them through
to publication in any form. However, he commissioned his student Arthur
Friedheim to orchestrate four of the pieces, and these versions were per-
formed twice (19 January 1886 in Weimar and 11 June 1886 in Sonders-
hausen) with the composer in attendance.
The idea for the cycle of pieces honouring Hungarian national heroes
probably came to Liszt in 1885. In this year, he composed four of the seven
pieces in the set – the same four performed in Friedheim’s orchestrations7 –
all dedicated to the memory of nineteenth-century statesmen who had
worked for the independence of Hungary. Stephan Széchenyi (1791–1860)
was the founder of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and served as min-
ister of transport in the first Hungarian Cabinet in 1848. Joseph Eötvös
(1813–71), a writer and politician, served as minister for religion and edu-
cation. Ladislaus Teleki (1811–61), a member of the Kossuth party, had been
executed in ‘effigie’ by Austria in 1852, but died by committing suicide.
Franz Deák (1803–76), minister for justice in 1848, was instrumental in the
settlement in 1867 between Hungary and Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph.
To create the cycle, Liszt combined the four pieces dedicated to political
figures with revised versions of three pieces he had written earlier in memory
of two great Hungarian poets, Michael Vörösmarty (1800–55), author of
the patriotic poem ‘Szózat’, and Alexander Petöfi (1823–49), the leader of
the March youth movement of 1848 and author of ‘A Magyarok Istene’
(‘Ungarns Gott’), which Liszt had set in 1881; and the composer and critic
Michael Mosonyi (1815–70), whom Liszt greatly admired. The piece for
Vörösmarty was likely written after Liszt composed his arrangement ‘Szózat
128 James M. Baker
and Hymnus’ in 1872. He wrote the first version of the piece dedicated
to Petöfi in 1874 as incidental music for ‘Die Liebe des toten Dichters’, a
ballad by Jokai. Liszt arranged this work in 1877 as the piano piece ‘Dem
Andenken Petofis’, to which he added opening and closing materials to
incorporate it into the Historical Portraits. Upon Mosonyi’s death in 1870
Liszt had written ‘Mosonyis Grabgeleit’. This piece was slightly expanded
(additions of simple repetitions of phrases in the closing group are the only
changes) for the Historical Portraits. The following commentary provides
brief analytical observations for each of the seven pieces in the Historical
Hungarian Portraits, followed by a summary overview of the cycle.
1. ‘Stephan Széchenyi’. This piece is basically a simple two-part form,
with the main body of the work (bar 41f.) in D minor restated in brilliant
variation (bar 89f.) in D major. This form is expanded with the addition of
an Introduction, a transition between the two main sections, and a coda.
It is the eccentricity of the gestures – the obsessive sequencing of melodic
fragments and the absence of a real melody, along with frenetic repetitions –
that make the piece seem strange. The piece begins with a single line in
powerful triple octaves, and concludes on the leading tone identically set.
Underlying the introduction is an arpeggiation of the D minor triad, from
D at the outset to F (bar 9) through G (bar 17) to A (bar 23), with dominant
harmony prolonged from bar 23 through 40. The theme itself entails a
chromatic ascent in minor harmonies from the tonic D minor (bar 41) to
F (iii, bar 69). Thereafter the sequence is broken and harmony is directed
toward the dominant. With a change in key signature to D major, the main
material is sequenced up with major chords on D, E, and E (bar 109).
A new sequential pattern then leads to F major (III, bar 113), and then
onwards to the dominant, composed out in contrary-motion scales followed
by fanfare digressions to B (VI) and F major (iii, bars 125–32). We reach
the D major tonic as early as 133, and subsequent passagework extends
the tonic chord until the odd deviation to the leading tone at the end. The
subject matter of this number attributes to Széchenyi a quality of grim
determination changing over to victorious euphoria.
2. ‘Joseph Eötvös’. This piece is in a simple A–B–A form, with introduc-
tion. Certain connections with the previous piece (and others) corroborate
the impression of a cyclical design for the set of Historical Portraits. The
Introduction, in B major, culminates with the motivic figure of a descend-
ing perfect fifth, opening to the descending minor sixth: G–C, A–C (bars
19–23), a clear reference to the corresponding moment of the introduction
of the preceding number, ‘Széchenyi’ (bars 33–40). Here the A–C interval
is tonicised, as the fanfare-like A section in the key of A major (bar 24)
begins, developing the preceding P5–m6 motive, now expanded to P5–M6
(E–A, F–A). (Henceforth we shall refer to this motive generally as the 5–6
motive.) A monophonic transition leads to the dreamy B section in G major

and E minor, which has a melody based on rising thirds (B–D, E–G, etc.)
reciprocal with the descending sixths of the A section. The culminating pas-
sage of the B material (bars 68–78) closely resembles the beautiful Dolce
passage near the end of the final piece of the set (‘Mosonyi’, bars 68–77),
which was actually the first to be composed – again pointing to a cyclical
concept. The A material returns quite abruptly (bar 84), but is varied to end
with a grandiose F major chord (perhaps heard as tonicised, but bearing a
dominant functional relation to the B major key of the Introduction). This
piece conveys both the heroic and contemplative sides of Eötvös’s character.
3. ‘Michael Vörösmarty’. This piece follows from ‘Eötvös’ in a number
of respects. It is in the key of B, consigning to the F major conclusion of the
preceding piece a dominant function. Moreover, the main theme (bar 19f),
based on a phrase from Béni Egressy’s musical setting of Vörösmarty’s poem
‘Szózat’, is related to the contrasting theme of Eötvös (No. 2) in an abstruse
way; for the melody from ‘Eötvös’ (B–A–B–C–D) is the retrograde of the
beginning of the ‘Vörösmarty’ theme. The pedal on F (bar 17f.) picks up
the concluding bass pitches of No. 2 (bar 100). The piece also continues to
develop the 5–6 motive, especially in the Introduction and in the passage in
bar 29f. The form of No. 3 is quite comparable to that of No. 1, entailing the
presentation of a main theme in the minor followed by its presentation in the
major (bar 57f.), expanded with introductory, transitional, and concluding
materials. The B major tonal centre is felt strongly until a few bars before
the end, when a monophonic progression in tripled octaves digresses to a
foreign pitch (compare the ending of No. 1), in this case G. This pitch
is not tonicised but rather is probably still perceived as the lowered sixth
scale degree of B major. The odd close of No. 3 makes for an interesting, if
harmonically unsure, transition to No. 4. The subject matter of ‘Vörösmarty’
differs from the preceding pieces. There are no abrupt contrasts; rather,
the gradually evolving main theme leads slowly but convincingly to the
belligerent close, depicting a person of subtle mind and strong conviction.
4. ‘Ladislaus Teleki’. This movement is an abbreviated version of a
‘Trauermarsch’ composed likewise in 1885. It is the centrepiece of the set
of seven Historical Portraits, and stands apart from the rest in its unrelent-
ing dissonance. It is uniquely a Basso ostinato composition whose bass is
taken from the first section of Mosonyi’s piano piece, ‘Trauerklänge zum
Tode István Széchenyis’, thereby alluding to the men to whom the first and
last pieces of the set are dedicated. This work remains tonally ambiguous
throughout. The key signature indicates G minor, within which key the bass
pattern might be understood to function, but no definitive resolution to a
triadic sonority occurs (the moment of repose on the E 6/4 chord in bar 70
is the closest we come in the piece to a sense of cadence). The ostinato figure
130 James M. Baker
places exceptional emphasis on C, the tritone of G, and the piece ends on
that pitch in bare quadruple octaves with tremolo, signifying catastrophe.
Overall the upper voice traverses intervals of a single underlying diminished-
seventh chord, descending from E4 (bar 5) to G3 (bar 22) then ascending
gradually to C6 (bar 53). The chord is frequently heard in pure form (e.g.
bars 12, 59, and 72 – in the last instance as the resolution of a retardation).
The piece might be regarded as prolonging a diminished-seventh harmony –
a symmetric configuration. Liszt’s iconography, however, suggests that we
gauge the events of the piece against the tonal centre of G. We encountered
this key area previously in the dreamy middle section of ‘Eötvös’ in the
major mode. Here the piece starts out ominously in the minor, and ulti-
mately the centre of G cannot hold, subverted by the evil influence of the
tritone, C. ‘Teleki’ begins with melodic material seemingly derived from
the main theme of ‘Vörösmarty’ (see especially the Doloroso melody at bar
21). The increasingly activated texture signals mounting fear, reaching a cli-
max at bar 53 with the G–C tritone formed between bass and upper voice.
Tension is eerily suspended during the poignant passage in bars 57–73 – a
moment of sad reflection or, perhaps, false hope. The evil force of C soon
returns to seize control, however.
5. ‘Franz Deák’. As with most of the Portraits, this piece opens with an
introduction based on the 5–6 motive. It begins in D minor, but ends in B
major, juxtaposing these two chords in the cadential gesture in the last three
measures. D minor could be understood as constituting the long-denied
dominant of the G minor key of No. 4, and B is its relative major. On the
other hand, the C at the close of No. 4 may be taken as leading tone of the
tonic D, now restored. ‘Deák’ is a swaggering march (suggesting something
about the character of the dedicatee) and employs a harmonic technique
Liszt often used when writing in that genre: the juxtaposition of passages in
sharp and flat key areas. Thus the harmony modulates unexpectedly to the
sharp side for the middle section of the piece (beginning at bar 69). This
movement logically follows from the preceding movement in one particular
respect: it exploits the diminished-seventh chord that was the basis for No. 4,
now using it as a dominant in the keys of B major (bars 71) and D major
(bar 75). These third-related chords are the framework for the obsessive
descending chromatic progression that follows in bars 81–8 (repeated down
an octave in bars 93–100). Finally the C diminished-seventh chord occurs
in 101–4 as an auxiliary to B major, by means of which we return to the flat
side and arrive at the key in which the piece closes. The passage in bars 105–20
combines sharps and flats in an unusual way. The F major chord (perhaps
an allusion to the concluding chord of No. 2) here can be understood as VI
of B. Like Nos. 1 and 3, ‘Deák’ progresses from minor mode to major. It
ends with a triumphant fanfare, as does No. 2.
6. ‘Alexander Petöfi’. This piece begins with an extended introduction,

in which an unaccompanied tenor voice mulls over sad sequential phrases
based on the motivic descending fourth. The tenor voice touches upon
the main theme in the tonic key of E minor (bar 11), leading to the main
statement of the mournful theme beginning in bar 15. This theme unfolds
in sequential phrases composing out an arpeggiation of E minor from E
(i, bar 15) through G (III, bars 25–8) to B (V, bars 29–41). The passage in the
area of the dominant is extended to include unusual chromatic deviations
such as A, F, and E. A brief interlude in the major mode of E now
occurs (bars 41–52), the high register, folk-like melody, and absence of firm
grounding in root-position harmonies signifying perhaps a recollection of
bucolic bliss. The melody here drifts upward in stepwise sequence, defining
an underlying motion from G to B. The A theme returns as expected, but is
now grandiosely stated in the strange key of D minor, only to be followed
in bar 57 by the melody in the expected key of E, but in its major mode.
(This reflects a unique expansion of the basic form involving minor–major
contrast exhibited by Nos. 1 and 3 of the set.) Harmony continues to push
forward, however, to a climax on C major (with E in bass) in bars 61–3.
This harmony and other pitches in the passage are derived from the minor
mode of E, but beginning in bar 68 the major mode begins to assert itself,
and the closing passage in bars 71–8 uses only the diatonic major scale of E.
Thereafter the harmony trails off in the key of C major.8 The lack of bass
support ensures that this digression will not displace the firmly grounded
E as tonal centre. But C major, with its many sharps together with the
ethereal registration, is suggestive of the heavenly realms of the next world.
In terms of a structural function, the modulation to C plays a transitional
role, for the final E of this piece connects with the poignant F in the bass
at the beginning of the final number.9 This piece befits an elegy for a poet,
for it projects the full gamut of emotions, from sorrowful lyricism, through
tender recollection, to tragic grandeur.
7. ‘Michael Mosonyi’. At the beginning of ‘Mosonyi’, the bass introduces
a sighing motive F–E. In the context of the preceding number, E might be
understood as providing a resolution of F. The reverse ultimately proves to
be the case, however, for the main body of the piece is in D minor, with
F in the bass. (The so-called ‘gypsy scale’, emphasising the tritone above
the tonic and the augmented second between scale degrees 6 and 7, is in
evidence directly preceding the arrival of the main theme.) The main theme
modulates to the major mediant, F major (bars 22–4). (Note here the
reversal with E in the bass resolving upwards to F.) In bars 25–36, the
preceding passage is taken up a semitone to D minor (the relative minor of
F major), but revamped to modulate to B major (in effect the dominant of
D minor) indicating an underlying progression by major thirds: d-F-B.
132 James M. Baker
The touching contrasting material enters in bar 37, where it occurs in

the key of G major (the enharmonic equivalent of F major encountered
earlier), in an ethereally high register, and treated with great rhythmic sup-
pleness in 5/4 metre. The melodic motion from natural to raised fifth in
the melody in bars 39–40 connects this theme with the main theme. The
contrasting theme is then restated in the middle register beginning in E
major in bar 43 (down one whole tone) but modulating to the dominant
of B major, on which harmony the music fades away. At this point the
material of the introduction returns by means of a chromatic resolution in
the bass from F (bar 46) to F (bar 52). The ensuing passage builds to a
tremendous climax, the apotheosis of the main theme in the original key
of D minor at bar 64, but transformed to linger on the upper-neighbour of
A, B. Further chromatic change brings about the arrival of a new section in
bar 68 in B major (fulfilling the earlier expectation of that key in bar 52).
In this episode the bass descends through the whole-tone scale from D2
to E1 as the melody descends somewhat chromatically from B6 to A5,
arriving on a diminished chord on E (bar 74). This chord leads to a closing
section in D major based on the contrasting material, but citing as well the
motivic chromatic relations A–A (B) in the melody (bar 81) and F–F
in bars 89–91 and 93–5.
This final piece of the set concludes in D, the key of the beginning of
the cycle (‘Széchenyi)’, and in the major mode, providing a sense of framing
and closure to the whole. One could well imagine that Liszt had in mind
concluding the set with this number – the oldest of the pieces – from the
start. Indeed, the tone of solemnity and peace at the end provides an espe-
cially fitting conclusion. None of the preceding numbers offers this sort of
resolution. Since this piece is the longest of the set in real time, in a cer-
tain sense the cycle is weighted toward it, creating a sense of directedness
and culmination. At one point Liszt envisioned concluding the Historical
Hungarian Portraits with a ‘fanfare apotheosis’, for on 30 July 1885 he wrote
from Weimar to Princess Carolyne: ‘You are swimming in Buddhism –
and I for my part am immersing myself musically in Magyarism through
6 or 7 historical portraits: István Széchenyi, Deák, László Teleki, Eötvös,
Vörösmarty, Petöfi, and the funeral procession of my friend Mosonyi –
the whole thing ending with a fanfare apotheosis.’10 He evidently changed
his mind in much the same way that years before he had ultimately opted
for a quiet, solemn ending to the Piano Sonata. (We will see, however,
that he employed such a ‘fanfare apotheosis’ to close his greatest cycle,
the Troisième année of the Années de pèlerinage.) It is perhaps especially
touching that he chose to close this work, a tribute to the great Hungarian
heroes of his time, with his beautiful remembrance of his colleague in music,
Mosonyi.
Liszt had always had a rather casual attitude regarding the performance of
his works, and in characteristic fashion had commissioned orchestrated ver-
sions of the four new numbers composed for the set of Hungarian Historical
Portraits (the four dedicated to political heroes, all composed in 1885) –
probably with the specific opportunities of the 1886 concerts in mind.
Nevertheless, the genius of his compositional concept emerges only when
the work is examined as a whole, with the pieces in the sequence that he
ultimately specified. In the previously cited letter to his publisher of June
1885 (see p. 127), it is probably not coincidental that he laid out the names
of the dedicatees in a cruciform grid – for he, as a devout Catholic, would
have composed these memorials in the hope and belief that the souls of these
heroes rest with God for eternity. The close of the final piece of the cycle
clearly conveys the sense of a prayer: ‘Rest in peace.’ Liszt would have drawn
the cross as an invocation of Christ’s saving grace. From Liszt’s descrip-
tion of his project in the letter, it might appear that the piece dedicated to
Mosonyi was an appendix or afterthought to a sixfold structure, since his
name is not part of the cruciform design. However, many features of the
cycle point to ‘Mosonyi’ as the true goal of a carefully constructed composi-
tional trajectory. The addition of ‘Mosonyi’ to the six pieces inscribed in the
cruciform plan results in a cycle of seven pieces, the number seven bearing
sacred connotations, associated with the seven sacraments and numerous
features of God’s creation.
It is natural that Liszt would have decided to end the cycle with ‘Mosonyi’,
the most substantial and dramatically satisfying of the pieces. The extended
peaceful close of this work is by far the most suitable of the seven pieces for
concluding a memorial collection. Assuming Liszt made the decision early
on in the project to place ‘Mosonyi’ last, it makes sense that he would have
sought to begin the cycle in the same key as it ends, the key of D. Neither of
the older works, ‘Vörösmarty’ and ‘Petöfi’, were originally in this key, and
Liszt ultimately decided to retain their original keys, B and E respectively,
in the cycle. Neither would have offered the boldness he evidently sought
for the opening number, so he must have decided to compose ‘Széchenyi’
specifically to be the first piece in the set. Of the other newly composed
pieces, only ‘Deák’ is also in the key of D, but its dramatic profile is quite
different and would not have grabbed the attention of the listener the way
‘Széchenyi’ does. He wisely decided to place ‘Deák’ immediately after ‘Teleki’,
probably in order to re-establish our tonal orientation after the upheaval of
that movement.
Of the seven movements of the Historical Portraits only the last ends
definitively in the key in which it began. It is noteworthy that Liszt com-
posed new endings for the other two older pieces in the set, endings that
digress from the main key and serve, as has been shown, as transitions to the
134 James M. Baker
numbers that follow. One could infer that the endings of the newly com-
posed pieces, all of which digress from their respective tonal centres, were
likewise devised specifically for the transitional functions that have already
been pointed out. If so, then these pieces can only make sense as harmonic
structures in the context of the whole – the cycle of seven pieces in the order
specified.
The harmonic scheme of the cycle does not exist as a design unto itself,
however, but rather supports a dramatic progression, which can perhaps
best be described as a grand arch encompassing all seven pieces. After the
fierce, bombastic fanfares of ‘Széchenyi’, first in D minor then in D major,
we proceed to the grandiose march of ‘Eötvös’. This work begins in A major,
the key of the dominant (all key areas here are expressed as functions of D),
but ends in the major mediant, F major. As mentioned, the final portion of
the contrasting central section of this piece appears to foreshadow a passage
from the heavenly close of ‘Mosonyi’, the final piece of the set. ‘Vörösmarty’
builds gradually in the key of the submediant, B (minor then major), starting
as if in the distance but ending with a determined passage in octaves that
captures something of the immediacy of the first piece in the set. ‘Teleki’
starts out quietly but more ominously than its predecessor, but with weirder
harmony that remains dissonant throughout, building to a terrifying climax
on the G–C tritone. The latter half of the piece dwells in particular on C,
the leading tone, presented uniquely at the end in quadruple octaves with
tremolo. This passage, which resonates with the focus on the leading tone
at the end of the first piece, is the locus of highest tension in the cycle
and constitutes the apex of the arch form. The symbolic use of the tritone
signifies the horror of death.
‘Deák’, a brilliant march full of machismo, follows immediately in the
tonic key (minor then major), both providing instant relief from the catas-
trophe of ‘Teleki’ as well as restoration of our tonal bearings. It remains
robust throughout, as did the first number. The final page of music of this
piece, in B major (VI), seems to function not so much as a transition to
the next (it does not connect all that well), but rather to take the place of
the D major tonic, in the conventional role of a submediant function in a
deceptive cadence. It prevents the tonic key of this piece from taking hold
prematurely, which would destroy the balance of the arch. ‘Petöfi’ presents
an instantaneous change in mood from ‘Deák’. The single voice heard in
the introduction projects an individual, introverted expression. The music
moves from a melancholy, yearning expression in E minor (ii), through a
nostalgic episode hinting at E major, to an impassioned apotheosis of the
theme, first in D minor, finally attaining (or nearly so) the goal of E major
(II). The piece fades to a close in C major, bringing back the leading tone
yet again. Of particular significance in ‘Petöfi’ are the numerous repetitions
Liszt introduced when he reworked the piece for inclusion in the Historical
Portraits. The sighing figure in bar 19, for instance, occurred only once in the
original, but is here repeated in bar 20. Liszt may have decided to repeat such
figures in order to draw a direct correspondence with the subject matter of
the final piece, ‘Mosonyi’, which is replete with such obsessive sighs, creating
a mood of deep sorrow (see, for instance, bars 13–14 or 19–21). This type of
revision once again points to ‘Mosonyi’ as the basis for the cyclical scheme.
Only ‘Mosonyi’, of all the pieces in the set, projects both the depth of sor-
row and the height of tragedy befitting a conclusion to Liszt’s memorial to
Hungarian heroes. This piece touches upon a number of harmonies which
resonate with significant moments earlier in the cycle: F major and later
G major in bars 23 and 37 (resonating with the ending of No. 2), E major
in bar 43 (with No. 6), and G major in bar 82 (with Nos. 2 and 3). It builds
to a climactic apotheosis of the main theme in D minor, which subsides to
a tender recollection of the contrasting theme in D major, and closes on a
solemn note of faith and hope. In spite of the strong projection of the tonic
at the conclusion, however, Liszt rigorously avoids stating the tonic root in
the low bass, perhaps signifying that life is part of a greater continuum in
which only God has the final word.
Années de pèlerinage, troisième année

Perhaps the finest large work of Liszt’s late period is the collection of pieces
he published in 1883 as Années de pèlerinage, troisième année. At least four
of the seven pieces in this collection had been composed in 1877, and the
other two even earlier, so once again there is evidence of the composer’s
hesitancy in bringing forth his work. Liszt apparently did not begin work
on the 1877 pieces with a collection in mind, but in the brief time that
those pieces emerged, he must surely have considered their relation one to
another. Identifying the resulting collection as the third year of his Years
of Pilgrimage collections was evidently a much later phase of the process.
The music of the first two sets that he had called Années de pèlerinage had
been composed nearly four decades earlier, the products respectively of his
life with Marie d’Agoult in Switzerland and his encounters with the art and
literature of Italy. We shall consider Liszt’s purpose in rounding out the
pilgrimage series with a third volume late in his career after we survey the
individual pieces and overall structure of the cycle.
In the summer of 1877, Liszt was feeling tired and depressed. In June, he
had written Princess Carolyne from Weimar using the words of Jesus’s agony
in the garden of Gethsemane to describe his spiritual exhaustion: ‘Tristis est
anima mea!’11 At the end of August he returned to the Villa d’Este, where
136 James M. Baker
he, unlike Christ, was able to find solace and inspiration in the beauty of
nature. His letters of the early fall report a deep involvement with the Villa’s
famous cypresses:
These 3 days I have spent entirely under the cypresses! It was an obsession,
impossible to think of anything else, even church. Their old trunks were
haunting me, and I heard their branches singing and weeping, bearing the
burden of their unchanging foliage! At last they are brought to bed on music
paper; and after having greatly corrected, scratched out, copied, and
recopied them, I resign myself to touching them no more. They differ from
the cypresses of Michelangelo by an almost loving melody.
May the good angels make the most beautiful inner music for you
[Princess Carolyne] – the music we shall hear fully, in its boundlessness,
there above! 12
In fact, Liszt composed two separate pieces depicting the cypresses of the
Villa d’Este. The second piece was associated in his mind (as indicated by
the reference in the above quotation) with the figure of Michelangelo, who
was reputed to have planted the cypresses at the Roman monastery of Santa
Maria degli Angeli. When Liszt learned soon after writing the second cypress
piece that there was in fact no historical connection between the artist and
those trees, he renamed his second cypress piece, resulting in a pair of
pieces, ‘Aux Cyprès de la Villa d’Este’ Nos. I and II. Liszt conceived of these
as works of great gravity and mourning with an otherworldly detachment:
‘I shall call them Thrénodies, as the word élégie strikes me as too tender,
and almost worldly.’13 Remarkably, Liszt was able to snap out of his funk
immediately after writing the cypress pieces, for by early October he had
dashed off two other pieces of much more hopeful character – the ‘Angelus!’
and ‘Sursum corda’, which ended up as the first and last movements of the
cycle. All of these pieces arose from the composer’s sense of inner necessity,
and he recognised that they would not easily find an audience: ‘These pieces
are hardly suitable for drawing rooms and are not entertaining, nor even
dreamily pleasing. When I publish them I’ll warn the publisher that he
risks selling only a few copies.’14 Miraculously, the sparkling and brilliantly
innovative ‘Les jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este’ evidently sprang from his pen
at this very time as well, when one might have expected him to be bowed
down with depression.
It is difficult to pin down exactly when Liszt had the idea of creating a cycle
using these five pieces. They were not published individually in advance of
publication of the set in 1883. By 1882 he had decided to bring together these
pieces with two older as yet unpublished pieces, both funereal in character,
and to publish them as the third book of Années. The resulting collection is
a highly unified arrangement of seven pieces, four of them threnodies. As
in his later Historical Portraits, Liszt creates a symmetrical form by placing

two laments on either side of the central ‘Jeux d’eau’ movement – which
provides much-needed respite from the gravity and gloominess which oth-
erwise might overwhelm the listener. The work is framed by the innocent,
lighthearted ‘Angelus!’ at the beginning and the final ‘Sursum corda’, a move-
ment of powerful intensity portraying the striving of the soul toward God.
1. ‘Angelus! Prière aux anges gardiens’. In a letter of October 14, 1877,
Liszt reported that he had just written ‘Angelus!’: ‘[I]n early October, there
was the feast day of the Holy Angels [October 2]. I wrote a hundred or
so measures for them . . . and wish I could better express my intimate
devotion to the divine messengers.’15 He subsequently indicated that he had
composed this piece for his grand-daughter Daniela, and in the first edition
of Book III of the Années he included a picture of his three grand-daughters
(the daughters of Richard and Cosima Wagner), depicted as angels with
wings and musical instruments (taken from a painting by Zhukovsky that
hung in the Wagner home, Wahnfried).16 In the blurred sonorities of the
introduction to this piece Liszt attempted as well to capture the effect of
interrupted cadences of bells echoing through the Italian countryside.17
The tune in E major in lilting 6/8 metre creates a simple, pastoral ambiance.
The simplicity of ‘Angelus!’ is not without drama, however. Most of
the tension of the piece resides in chromatic digressions from the E major
diatonic, as first occurs in bar 9, when D and G unexpectedly enter in
the lowest voice and alternate respectively with D and G in subsequent
bars. In bars 27–36, the harmony drifts off unexpectedly from the diatonic,
employing D, C, A, and B in distinctive ways. The D major chord in bar
29 lends special emphasis to the chromatic variant D first encountered in
bar 9. Such chromaticism results in extended phrases and focuses attention
on critical junctures in the phrasing, such as the resumption of the normal
diatonic scale in bar 37, and the cadence to the dominant in bars 67–8.
‘Angelus!’ may be regarded as a small-scale sonata form. Following a
brief silence after the dominant has been secured, a transition leads to the
beginning of the development section, where the underlying progression of
the upper voice in bars 74–89 is an ascending chromatic line – C, C, D,
D – developing the lower-voice motion from bars 9–10. The development
touches upon mediant (III, bar 111) and submediant regions (VI and vi,
bars 125 and 130). The transformation of the theme at bar 157 signals the re-
capitulation (at which point an alternate passage is provided in case the
piece is played on the harmonium, an option for this movement only). The
recurrence of the introductory material at bar 191 marks the beginning of
the coda. For Liszt at age 66 and in a generally morose state of mind to have
written such a piece is remarkable. This music is certainly an idealisation
of pastoral and angelic worlds, but it is not without a sense of trouble,
138 James M. Baker
regret, or loss. In its dramatic depiction of the guardian angels, it runs the
affective gamut from tender beneficence to steadfast militancy. In terms of
the meaning of the cycle as a whole, ‘Angelus!’ might be regarded as Liszt’s
depiction of the state of spiritual innocence, now in the past yet still an ideal
as we forge ahead on life’s journey.
2. ‘Aux cyprès de la Villa d’Este No. I: Thrénodie’. The first of the cypress
pieces begins with the bare F–B diminished fourth in the low bass, creating
tremendous ambiguity. Are we in B or G? The key of the piece turns out to
be neither of these, but rather G – first secured in its minor mode in bar 33,
but transmogrified to the major at the recapitulation of the Appassionato
theme (bar 131). The allusion to G is not without significance, however,
for the contrasting Appassionato theme makes its first appearance in that
key in bar 47. In ‘Cypress I’, the central chromatic opposition of D vs.
D from ‘Angelus!’ is now recontextualised in G minor as E yielding to
D. This relation is part of the opening melodic motive, consisting of a
chromatic turn about D, followed by an ascent to A. This motive is then
developed in the melody of the barcarolle-like episode at bar 33, where the
tonal centre is first clarified. It recurs as well in the melody of the Tranquillo
passage (bar 63), decorating the dominant note, and in the bass at Più agitato
(bar 87), embellishing C – at a tritone’s distance from the tonic. Tension
builds to the cathartic passage at bar 107, where the motive is sounded
over the tremolando C–G tritone. The concluding passage of the work
(from bar 191) focuses on the voice-leading tendencies of the crucial D/E
equivalency. Thus the process of developing variation might be viewed as
governing the form.
Like the first piece of the set, this piece could also be described as an
adapted sonata form, with introduction, exposition of first and second
themes (bars 33 and 47), development, and recapitulation (second theme
only, bar 131) in the key of the tonic major. Unexpectedly, however, new
material enters around bar 147 in what might be a coda. Continuing in
G major, this new subject employs open high-register chords and a good
deal of similar motion, reminiscent of late Beethoven (e.g. the first move-
ment of the Piano Sonata, op. 101). Another allusion possibly conveyed
by this new material would be to the bucolic and nostalgic contrasting
theme of Chopin’s Nocturne, op. 37, no. 2, likewise in G major (compare
especially bars 180–3 of the Liszt with the subject as stated in the closing
measures of the Nocturne). The G major ending of ‘Cypress I’ must not be
taken too optimistically; Liszt aptly described this piece as ‘a fairly gloomy
and disconsolate elegy . . . illumined toward the end by a beam of patient
resignation’.18 His use of the late style of Beethoven, which often conveys a
topic of transcendental acceptance of fate, perfectly captures the meaning he
intended.
3. ‘Aux cyprès de la Villa d’Este No. II: Thrénodie’. The second cypress
piece opens with an invocation of the ‘Tristan’ motive, bringing myriad
associations of the tragedy of star-crossed lovers. The meaning of this gesture
for Liszt may have been even more complex, for he had actually introduced
the motive – years before it was appropriated by Wagner – in the song
‘Die Lorelei’ (1841), which was one of only three pieces that Liszt ever
dedicated to Marie d’Agoult, mother of his three children. The legend of
the Lorelei was connected with the Rhine and associated in Liszt’s mind
with the island of Nonnenwerth, where he and Marie had spent several
idyllic summers in the early 1840s before they became estranged.19 As noted
earlier, when composing this work Liszt also had in mind the heroic figure of
Michelangelo, whose statue for the tomb of Lorenzo de’ Medici had inspired
‘Il penseroso’ in the second book of Années de pèlerinage. This cypress piece
is therefore quite different from the first in tone and subject matter. While
the first has an almost sinister aspect, this piece depicts not only passion and
tormented love but also heroic grandeur. Both versions end with a mood of
tender consolation and acceptance.
The introduction to ‘Cypress II’ focuses on the tritone and fifth of the
tonic E – A and B.20 The resolution of A or its equivalent B is the subject
of a pivotal transitional passage first encountered in bars 11–14 (resolving to
the dominant of E minor). This passage recurs twice in the piece, each time
with a different harmonic setting: bars 26–9 (resolving to an augmented-
sixth chord leading to D major, equivalent to the major submediant of E
major) and bars 203–7 (to an A major chord functioning as major mediant
of E major). The main theme of the piece enters in D major (= VI) in bar 31,
but moves by the end of the phrase to the tonic (bars 35–6). The consequent
phrase leads to the key of the tritone, B major, in bar 44, whereupon the
contrasting subject, a fanfare of sorts, enters, stated in both major and minor
versions of that key (bar 47). A transition based on the ‘Tristan’ motive leads
to a Dolce passage in the beneficent key of F major (bar 68), which might
depict the gentle rustling of the wind through the limbs of the cypresses.
A passionate melody emerges in bar 76, the third subject, beginning in F
major but modulating a fifth higher to C major (bar 92). The premature
modulation in bar 80 is a slight fault in this beautiful idea, which otherwise
could be among Liszt’s finest melodic inspirations. The sighing and weeping
of the cypresses is aptly conveyed in the Dolente passage beginning in bar
96, which recasts the Tristan motive in the melody.
Beginning in bar 106, the material associated with the third subject is now
repeated nearly exactly, but transposed up a minor third, so as to cadence in
the key of the tonic major in bar 132. The wholesale transposition continues
beyond this point, however, extending as far as the second repetition of the
Appassionato theme in bar 154. Here this theme is varied both melodically
140 James M. Baker
and harmonically, hinting at an unrealised modulation to D minor. Instead,

this passage is cut off abruptly, followed in bar 162 by a surging variation of
the main theme – in fact harmonically a true recapitulation of the material
in bars 31–46. The recapitulation of the military fanfare in bars 178–91 is
exact in every respect, including the original key area of B. A coda ensues
based primarily on the arpeggiated material associated with the cypresses.
The bass proceeds downward by step from third to root of the scale, from
G (bar 208) through F (bar 216), coming to rest gently on the tonic E in
bar 226. A single voice emerges amidst the arpeggios from time to time with
the ‘Tristan’ motive, expanded into a full-fledged recitative just prior to the
arrival on the tonic. This lone voice ends the piece with a phrase reciprocal
with the unaccompanied melody that closes the first piece, ‘Angelus!’ This
correspondence creates a frame which defines a formal unit comprising the
first three pieces in the cycle, lending emphasis to E as tonal centre.
4. ‘Les jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este’. Liszt’s depiction of the fountains at
the Villa d’Este is one of the pivotal pieces in the piano literature. That he
composed this work – so youthful and fresh in both instrumental technique
and harmony – alongside the Cypress pieces is evidence of his strength of
will and abiding religious faith. Situated in the cycle between two pairs of
threnodies, ‘Jeux d’eau’ appears as a spring of water in the desert. It is clear
from Liszt’s citation of John 4:14 midway through the piece (bar 144) that
his composition is no mere depiction of sparkling water effects; he found
in the fountains of the Villa a symbol of God’s healing grace: ‘But whoever
drinks the water I shall give will never thirst; the water I shall give will
become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.’21 This piece,
being the central piece in the cycle, might be assumed to be the apex of an
arch form (a beneficent one, in comparison to the trauma experienced in
‘Teleki’ at the comparable point in the Historical Hungarian Portraits). On
the other hand, though its dazzling effects constitute a local climax in the
cycle, a larger highpoint is yet to come. So, although the cycle of the Années,
Book III does not conform to a simple arch design, the ‘Jeux d’eau’ provides
restoring refreshment to those who face further sadness and tribulation as
the pilgrimage continues.
The form of ‘Jeux d’eau’ is very different from the others of the series,
or, indeed, from Liszt’s forms in general. It consists of a series of variations
without the sharp contrast of key areas normally found in his compositions.
Harmony is rich yet vague, and continually changes without a strong sense
of modulating away from the tonal centre. The piece is in the key of F
major, which lends itself to effects of light sparkling through jets of water,
and from a spiritual standpoint is associated in Liszt’s music with heavenly
realms. The appearance of F as the tonic key fulfils the foreshadowings of
this key (by G) in ‘Cypress I’ (at the beginning and in the first statement
of the Passionato theme in bar 49) and ‘Cypress II’ (bar 68), and resonates
with subsequent appearances of F in ‘Sunt lacrymae’ (bars 73 and 124) and
especially the ‘Marche funèbre’, which concludes in F major. The harmony
even makes an appearance (as G major) over the pedal E in ‘Sursum corda’
(bar 64).
Liszt’s wonderfully crafted gestures, many of them original with this
work, anticipate the water effects achieved by Debussy and Ravel early in
the next century. Even more significant, the form of ‘Jeux d’eau’ consists
of a sequence of dazzling keyboard variations with subtly evolving har-
mony, anticipating the harmonic designs of such impressionist works as
Debussy’s ‘Reflets dans l’eau’. The dominant-ninth chord that opens the
piece establishes the characteristic sonority and places particular emphasis
on scale-degree 6, D, which is a motivic focal point throughout the piece
(see bars 36–8, the left-hand trill in bar 45, the harmonies on E major and
D minor in bars 154–5, the E major chord in bar 252, and the conversion
of the upper-voice E4 to D4 in bars 269–71, to name a few instances).
After an extended introduction, the main thematic group, consisting of
three distinct ideas, starts in bar 40 and is restated without harmonic change
beginning in bar 64. A fourth melodic idea enters in bar 88. Harmony shifts
downward by step to E major in bar 132 and D major in bar 144, but
is redirected toward F major with the shift to E and D in bars 154–5.
Beginning in bar 182, a large-scale bass progression descends from D2 to
D1 in bar 206, which supports a pentatonic passage in conjunction with a
massive crescendo. The bass descent ultimately culminates with the climactic
arrival of the dominant, C1 in bar 220. The glorious passage at this point is
the apotheosis of the opening theme of the piece. The melodic D, sounded
three times, proceeds up to E, the leading tone in bar 227, likewise sounded
three times. The melody attains the tonic F, sounded six times, even as the
dominant pedal continues in effect. (We can only speculate as to the possible
symbolism of twelve melodic strokes at this point, which might have had
a religious meaning for Liszt.) Following a brief recollection in the high
register of the idea from bars 48–51, the main motive is recalled, supported
by an exotic descending succession of chords distant from F major, at the
end of which an abrupt crescendo leads to a Sforzando A sixth chord. The
bass of this chord, C2, commences a stepwise descent to the tonic root, F1,
reached at the end. The fresh, open quality of the harmony of the work –
a masterful achievement on Liszt’s part – is the result of a new freedom
in composing out scalar motions in melody and bass, together with firm
control of registral connections across broad spans and colouristic chord
sequences based on common tones.
In January 1886 the young Claude Debussy, who had recently been
awarded the Prix de Rome and was living nearby at the Villa Medici, visited
142 James M. Baker
Liszt on three occasions. We know that Liszt played for him several of his
works, including ‘Au bord d’une source’ from Années, Book I, which surely
must have suggested to Debussy the possibilities for developing piano tech-
nique for impressionistic effects. If he did not hear Liszt play ‘Les jeux d’eau
à la Villa D’Este’, he certainly came to know it before writing such works
as ‘Reflets dans l’eau’ from Images, Book I (pub. 1905). Proof of his knowl-
edge of the piece is supplied in his ‘L’Isle joyeuse’ (1903–4), which virtually
quotes the figuration in bars 44–7 of ‘Jeux d’eau’.
5. ‘Sunt lacrymae rerum: en mode hongrois’. The title of this number,
composed in 1872, is taken from Virgil’s Aeneid (Book I, lines 462–3), as
Aeneas considers the fate of Troy: ‘Here are tears for misfortune, and here
men’s hearts are touched by human plight.’22 Liszt composed this lament
thinking back to the defeat of Hungary in the revolution of 1848–9. The
somewhat surprising dedication of the piece to his protégé and ex-son-in-
law Hans von Bülow may also have been intended to convey his sympathy to
the man who had suffered so much indignity when his wife Cosima, Liszt’s
daughter, left him for Richard Wagner.
This piece is in the key of A, but employs a Hungarian mode that empha-
sises the tritone, D, and contains many semitones and augmented seconds:
A–B–C()–D–E–F–G–A. Formally, the piece gives the impression at the
outset of beginning as the exposition of a sonata movement. The piece
evolves, however, in ways that make it difficult to pinpoint where the-
matic development ends and recapitulation begins – resulting in a form
that projects continuous development. After an ambiguous introduction
highlighting upper and lower chromatic neighbours of the tonic, the main
theme enters in the tonic (upbeat to bar 10) – a dolorous phrase followed
by a modal melisma. The theme continues as this phrase is transposed to
C minor (upbeat to bar 15), which leads through F minor (bars 20–1) to
a lilting and tender contrasting subject. This idea, which might be regarded
as a consequence of the initial thematic phrases, ultimately proves to be
in A major (bars 22–30), which perhaps should be considered a lowered
chromatic variant of the original key of A. The lowered tonic is reinforced
by the crashing explosion on A in the extreme low bass (bar 30), heard
first in conjunction with the A harmony, then in bars 39–41 as part of
a thundering diminished-seventh chord with F in the bass. Note that the
pitches of the key areas set forth in this section – A, C, F, A (G) – are all
pitches of the underlying mode.
An episode in bars 42–56 developing the main subject, consistently for-
tissimo as if involved in a struggle of heroic proportions, leads to the appear-
ance of material closely related to the contrasting idea, transformed by
augmentation and stated dolcissimo, amoroso in a sequence from A major
(bar 57) to C minor (bar 65), mirroring the key relationship between the
phrases in A minor and C minor in bars 9–19. A morose response hovers

between major and minor modes of B in bars 67–8 and 71–2. Emotions
continue to vacillate with another transformation of the contrasting theme
in F major (bar 73), which is then sequenced up to G major (bar 77) and
subsequently interrupted by further ruminations on the main idea in C
minor (bar 81) that trail off on an indefinite half-diminished chord. The
episode from bar 57 is now restated (again in A major) in slightly varied
rhythm beginning in bar 89, but in bar 97 becomes more agitated, building
with a huge crescendo to the climax of the piece, the anguished outburst
in bars 101–4. The powerful harmony of this passage is derived from the
chromatic conflicts inherent in the Hungarian mode of the A tonality: F
vs. F and C vs. C. Belligerent triple octaves insist on F as emphasised
at the opening. However, the piece ends oddly with C in the bass beneath
high-register chords sounding F major and A major. Since C is the root
of neither harmony, there is little feeling of clarity at the conclusion.
6. ‘Marche funèbre: en mémoire de Maximilien I, Empereur du Mex-
ique, † 19 juin 1867’. Liszt’s political allegiances were complex. While a
native speaker of German, his sympathies were usually with the French,
as was the case during the Franco-Prussian war. In this cycle, alongside a
threnody for the Hungarian nation subjugated under Austrian rule, he saw
fit to place a funeral march he had composed in 1867 in memory of Max-
imilian I, younger brother of Emperor Franz Joseph. Maximilian, installed
in 1864 as Emperor of Mexico by Napoleon III, was captured and executed
by revolutionary forces three years later. In 1866, Liszt had been honoured
to accept from Maximilian the appointment as Grand-Officier de l’ordre de
la Guadeloupe, and he was terribly saddened at the news of the Emperor’s
demise. He placed a line from Propertius (Book II, Elegy 10, line 6) as an
epigram to the march: ‘In great things even to have wished is enough.’23 He
saw in Maximilian’s cruel death the tragedy of the unfulfilled promise of a
noble life cut short. What are we to make of the contradictory allegiances
conveyed in this pairing of the ‘Sunt lacrymae rerum’ and ‘Marche funèbre’?
Most certainly this is no hypocrisy. Rather, Liszt’s mourning of both rebels
and sovereign in these pieces combines with his personal laments in the
cypress pieces to make the cycle a powerful threnody for the condition of all
humankind, entirely in the spirit of his citation from Virgil: ‘Here are tears
for misfortune, and here men’s hearts are touched by human plight.’
The funeral march is based on the chromatic dyad F-F. It begins with
a grim march in F minor, with a melody that features a chromatic double-
neighbour motion about the fifth, C. This passage contains a transition
which leads to the wholesale repetition of this material up a major third in
A minor beginning in bar 33. As a result, the level of C is attained in bar
50, but coinciding at this juncture with a change to the major mode and the
144 James M. Baker
introduction of a new subject, a hopeful fanfare-like melody. This melody is

at first heard dolce and piano, but recurs triumphant in the closing measures
in the key of F major (bars 104–27). From this perspective, the overall
harmonic design is simple; the A section, in minor, effects a symmetrical
bass arpeggiation – F minor through A minor to C major – at which
point the contrasting B section begins. C major ultimately functions as
dominant of F major, the goal of the work. The ‘correction’ of F to F
occurs in microcosm in the bass of the recitative passage in bars 72–98,
which involves a descent, primarily stepwise, from F2 to F1. The piece ends
gloriously with clangorous chords arpeggiating tonic and subdominant of
F major, tolling an ecstatic ‘Amen’.
7. ‘Sursum corda’. There can be no doubt of the formal effect of the final
piece of the Années de pèlerinage, troisième année. It is in every way a stirring,
cathartic culmination. ‘Sursum corda’ is structured virtually throughout on
a tonic pedal in E major, the key of the ‘Angelus!’– the initial piece in the
cycle – creating a large-scale frame for the set. This key was also asserted
by the grouping of the first three pieces in the set. The pedal tone is an
especially conspicuous feature of the finale, since it is sounded at regular
intervals, often forming astonishing dissonances with the melody (e.g. bars
55 and 59). This exaggerated emphasis on the low bass is of great significance
in the overall cycle, since the tonic bass is absent in the first piece after the
opening section, creating a structural void that remains unfilled until the
final movement. The ending of ‘Cypress II’, also in E major, is interesting
in this regard, for it reciprocates the ending of ‘Angelus!’ in its last melodic
gesture, but also duplicates the effect at the close of the first piece in its
lack of low-bass tonic support. The ‘Angelus!’ concludes with a meek 3̂–
2̂–1̂ descent in the unaccompanied melody, as if sounding in the distance.
‘Sursum corda’ takes up this quintessential gesture of melodic closure at
the conclusion, pounding out the descent from G to F in bars 91–2. The
ultimate descent to the tonic root is strongly implied, although Liszt places
equal or greater emphasis on scale-degree 5̂; at the end, a familiar concluding
gesture re-establishing the headtone of the fundamental line in Schenkerian
terms.
The theme of ‘Sursum corda’ is essentially the descent from scale-degree
5̂ to 1̂, the quintessence of melodic motion, only slightly embellished. In the
introduction, a simple version of this idea is expressed in the bass, which
begins on the decorated fifth, B. Instead of descending by step, however, the
theme leaps up by seventh to scale-degree 4̂, then proceeds by step as normal.
Note that at the moment F should descend to E in bar 9, this motion is
overlapped by the appearance of scale-degree 5̂ in the upper voice in bar 9.
This procedure of overlapping happens each time a descending line reaches
scale-degree 1̂ – even at the end – thus avoiding full closure. In its contours
and rhythmic profile, the basic theme of the ‘Sursum corda’ as it appears
at the opening (bars 1–8) and at the conclusion (bars 88–104) is a positive,
straightforward, diatonic variant of the tortured subject of the first of the
Cypress threnodies (see especially bars 33–5 of ‘Cypress I’). In this regard it
projects faith and hope as a response to the anxiety and doubt of the earlier
piece.
Whereas the theme in the introduction in the bass is diatonic, as the
piece continues the progress of the melodic line becomes more chromatic
and tortuous. The phrase beginning in bar 9 descends from A through G,
G, and F to F, which projects a strong tendency to resolve to E. Unexpect-
edly, however, the theme reverses direction at this point, and F pushes back
up to F. The tension between F and F encapsulates the basic struggle in
the piece – a striving upward against forces that pull one down. We recognise
that at the heart of this theme is the very dyad observed at the basis of the ear-
liest work in the set, the ‘Marche funèbre’. There and elsewhere in the cycle,
F was associated with evil forces, especially that of the tritone. The finale
fittingly restores the diatonic rule at its climax in bars 85–8, where the
sinister phrase C–B–F receives the definite response C–B–F. The jux-
taposition of C with C in these parallel phrases seems in particular to
allude to a motivic dichotomy important in the earlier pieces in the set in
E major. That relation comes to the fore in the development of ‘Angelus!’
where parallel phrases begin on C (bar 73) and C (bar 81). The concluding
bars of ‘Cypress II’ bring out the same relation. The close of ‘Sursum corda’
following the climax in bars 85–8 is in pure diatonic E major. It presents an
ecstatic fanfare strikingly similar to the close of the ‘Marche funèbre’, even
incorporating similar B major chords, here in the context of an authentic
rather than plagal cadence.
The meaning of the finale and its title, ‘Sursum corda’, is elucidated by
comments from Liszt’s correspondence. On 22 February 1883, just days after
he learned of the death of Wagner, Liszt wrote to Lina Ramann:
Ever since the days of my youth I have considered dying much simpler than
living. Even if often there is fearful and protracted suffering before death,
yet is death none the less the deliverance from our involuntary yoke of
existence . . . Religion assuages this yoke, yet our heart bleeds under it
continually! –
‘Sursum corda!’
In my ‘Requiem’ (for men’s voices) I endeavoured to give expression to the
mild, redeeming character of death. It is shown in the ‘Dies irae,’ in which
the domination of fear could not be avoided.24
The expression ‘Sursum corda’ is from the ordinary of the mass, at the point
just prior to the consecration of the Eucharist when the priest exhorts the
146 James M. Baker
faithful: ‘Lift up your hearts.’ For Liszt, as is clear from the citation above,
the idea of lifting one’s soul toward God brought associations of death.
Only through arduous struggle and fearful tribulation can the soul find
release. Tired in mind and body, Liszt longed for deliverance and heavenly
bliss. The finale of Book III of Années de pèlerinage depicts the completion
of the ultimate pilgrimage. The melody, like the soul, follows a tortuous
route, striving upward yet pushed back again and again, enduring agonising
dissonances, as at bar 59, and occasionally reaching moments of reward, as
with the G major harmony in bar 64. The moment of terror, the tritone, at
last arrives (bar 85), but the soul continues on to the ecstatic transcendence
of union with God. Liszt had originally considered ending his Historical
Hungarian Portraits with what he called a ‘fanfare apotheosis’.25 While he
opted instead for a peaceful conclusion to that cycle, there can be no doubt
that the earth-shattering fanfare at the close of ‘Sursum corda’ qualifies as this
sort of ending. The massive sonority of clangorous chords pealing out the
authentic cadence over tremolo tonic pedal represents nothing less than the
union of the soul with God.
We have noted a number of motivic links among the various movements
of the Années de pèlerinage, troisième année that result in the impression of
a unified cycle, but the tantalising question remains as to when and how
Liszt’s cyclic concept emerged. Manuscript and documentary sources do not
provide a definitive answer. However, I would like to offer what I consider
to be a reasonable hypothesis of the genesis of the work based on both
analytical data and the limited documentary evidence. It seems clear that
Liszt had not yet formed the idea of the cycle at the point in September
1877 when he was writing the two Cypress pieces. He was totally absorbed
in these two compositions, and felt strongly that they each should bear
the title ‘threnody’. Perhaps he remembered that five years earlier he had
used the same designation for a work he had originally called ‘Thrénodie
hongroise’26 – the piece he ultimately decided to include in the Années III
as ‘Sunt lacrymae rerum’. Now, it happens that ‘Sunt lacrymae’ bears strong
motivic connections to an earlier work, the ‘Marche funèbre’ he composed
in 1867 in memory of Maximilian, especially with regard to the F–F dyad.
That dyad is represented in the key design of the ‘Marche funèbre’, which
begins in F minor and ends in F major. The same dyad is at the heart of
the composition activity in ‘Sunt lacrymae’. Perhaps Liszt had consciously
modelled ‘Sunt lacrymae’ on the earlier work, but even if this were not the
case, it may be that this pitch relation may have had a particular significance
for him that would have caused him to employ it in both pieces. The fact that
the two Cypress pieces formed a diptych might have caused Liszt to realise
that his earlier works, ‘Sunt lacrymae’ and the ‘Marche funèbre’, comprised
a comparable pairing.
I would submit that it was at the point when he realised he had two pairs
of threnodies that Liszt recognised the potential basis for a cyclic work.
This must have occurred as he was composing the two Cypress pieces, or
almost immediately upon their completion, for he quickly wrote another
pair of pieces, the ‘Angelus!’ and the ‘Sursum corda’. His comments from
his correspondence are somewhat contradictory as to the inspiration for
‘Angelus!’ He wrote to Olga von Meyendorff on 14 October 1877 that he
had composed it for the occasion of the Feast of the Holy Angels, which
occurs on 2 October. He makes it clear that ‘Sursum corda’ was written in
direct response to ‘Angelus!’: ‘Having once started blackening music paper,
I wrote four more pages which will have as their epigraph: Sursum Corda.’27
The pairing of these pieces, which ended up as opening and concluding
numbers in the cycle, is especially obvious because they share the key of
E and both were based on aspects of the Roman Catholic liturgy. Unlike
the other pairs of pieces involved in the cycle, ‘Angelus!’ and ‘Sursum corda’
are completely contrasting in character. The former is tentative and tender,
the latter clangorous and cathartic, as befits the different roles they serve in
the cycle. I would maintain that Liszt must have developed his cyclic concept
by the time he conceived of ‘Angelus!’ and ‘Sursum corda’ as a pair, since the
latter is clearly intended as a closing piece in an imposing work. It should
be noted that Liszt’s comments in his correspondence give no indication
that he was conscious of such a plan, although his silence on the subject
cannot be taken as evidence to the contrary, since he was characteristically
very reticent about his compositions in progress.28
The choice to begin and end the cycle in the key of E is not surprising,
for Liszt identified this key with ardent emotion, often of an erotic nature,
usually depicted as the gradual progression through the full range of affective
states, from ineffable tenderness to full-blown ecstasy. Liszt had used E major
in this way in ‘Vallée d’Obermann’ in Book I of Années and in the ‘Sonetto
104 del Petrarca’ in Book II. He might have selected this key for the exterior
numbers of the cycle without considering the four funeral pieces already
composed. However, a connection noted previously would seem to indicate
that this choice of keys tied in with the harmonic structure of one of the
threnodies – for the close of ‘Cypress II’ (bars 241–4) clearly responds to that
of ‘Angelus!’ (bars 252–5). One would therefore assume that the concept for
‘Angelus!’ arose as Liszt was composing ‘Cypress II’, and here the letters offer
some intriguing information. Liszt wrote to Princess Carolyne on September
23 that the Cypress pieces had been ‘brought to bed on music paper’ and that
‘having greatly corrected, scratched out, copied, and recopied them, I resign
myself to touching them no more’.29 However, just four days later he wrote
to Olga von Meyendorff: ‘I have composed two groups of cypresses, each of
more than two hundred bars, plus a Postludium (Nachspiel) to the cypresses
148 James M. Baker
of the Villa d’Este. These sad pieces won’t have much success and can do
without it.’30 It happens that there exists an autograph sketch of the ‘Angelus!’
dated (in Liszt’s handwriting) ‘27 September (S.S. Cosmae et Damiani) 77 –
Villa d’Este F. Liszt’.31 This dating stands in apparent contradiction to his
later account of the piece’s having been inspired by the feast of the Holy
Angels on 2 October. However, there would be no discrepancy in Liszt’s
various datings if the piece that ultimately became the ‘Angelus!’ had arisen
originally as a concluding postlude for the pair of Cypress pieces. Indeed,
there is a strong correspondence between the mood at the end of Cypress
II and that of the ‘Angelus!’ It is noteworthy that, if the ‘Angelus!’ were
a postlude, its final phrase provides a clear answer to the question posed
by the final phrase of the preceding Cypress II. That relation is, of course,
suppressed in the ordering of the pieces in the Années III cycle, although
one is nonetheless aware of a correspondence.
I would submit that the occasion of the feast of the Holy Angels somehow
struck a chord with the composer and caused him to realise that what he
had been intending as a closing piece – one which would temper the gloom
of the Cypress pieces – could well be the opening of a larger work. It seems
probable that it was at this point that Liszt appreciated the correspondence
of his Cypress pair with his earlier funeral pieces, ‘Sunt lacrymae’ and the
‘Marche funèbre’, and decided to include both pairs in a set of pieces framed
by the already-composed E major piece, now called ‘Angelus!’, and a yet-to-
be-composed piece in the same key that would provide a fanfare apotheosis
as a conclusion.
At this point Liszt would probably have decided on the precise sequence
of the six pieces discussed this far. If ‘Angelus!’ were the opening piece, then
‘Cypress I’ and ‘II’, themselves a pair originally conceived to be played in
that order, would be best placed directly after the piece originally written to
be with them. This would result in a subgrouping of three pieces beginning
and ending in E major. On the other end of the cycle, the diptych of ‘Sunt
lacrymae’ and the ‘Marche funèbre’ would be followed by the concluding
E major piece. Tonally, the subgrouping of the last three pieces does not
cohere as does the initial grouping of three. However, as already noted, the
‘Sursum corda’ makes wonderful use of the F–F dyad so prevalent in the
two prior pieces. In so doing, it recasts the funereal subject matter of ‘Sunt
lacrymae’ and the ‘Marche funèbre’ in the refining fire of E major, the key
of the beginning of the cycle, thus framing the work and bringing it to a
cataclysmic close.
What is especially striking in Liszt’s correspondence involving the six
pieces already considered is that there is no mention of the central work of the
cycle, the ‘Jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este’, Almost certainly, then, this piece was
composed last of the seven in the cycle. I have been unable to find evidence
that ‘Jeux d’eau’ was composed soon after the ‘Sursum corda’. And Liszt’s first
mentions of the third volume of Années only occur in the correspondence
of 1882, as he is sending the work to press. Therefore the possibility exists
that ‘Jeux d’eau’ might have been written as late as 1882 (even though the
biographers consistently give 1877 as its date). We thus have a possible
explanation for the substantial delay in the publication of Années III after its
ostensible completion date of 1877. Liszt would almost certainly have been
dissatisfied with the set of six pieces as it stood before the addition of ‘Jeux
d’eau’. He would have been concerned about the heaviness and gloom of
four threnodies in succession, and he likely would have sought to highlight
the two separate diptychs by inserting a composition between them. Liszt
surely would have recognised the potential for the central composition of
the set to create symmetry in the design and perhaps even to serve as the
apex of an arch form. It might well have taken Liszt some time (months or
even years) to come up with a suitable composition for this purpose, but the
remarkable work he ended up composing for the centrepiece of the cycle
fulfils its function brilliantly.
Setting ‘Jeux d’eau’ in the key of F major was an ideal choice, for this
key figures importantly in the harmonic designs of all four threnodies. The
impression at the beginning of ‘Cypress I’ is that it might be in the key of G;
the key of F major is touched upon at important junctures of both ‘Cypress
II’ and ‘Sunt lacrymae’; and ultimately the ‘Marche funèbre’ concludes with
a heroic fanfare definitively in F major. In the final design, the key of F
frames a subgrouping of three pieces – the fourth, fifth, and sixth of the set –
analogous to the subgrouping of the first three framed by E major. More
broadly, ‘Jeux d’eau’ establishes F major as the central tonal plateau for the
cycle, embracing all but the outer pieces of the set. For Liszt the key of F
major signified heavenly realms, as compared with the heroic but still earthly
striving conveyed by E major. The difficulty and importance of the task Liszt
set for himself in composing the central piece of the cycle is indicated by the
text he chose to cite in the course of the work: ‘But whoever drinks the water
I shall give will never thirst; the water I shall give will become in him a spring
of water welling up to eternal life.’ This piece had to convey the restorative
power of God’s grace. It had to provide refreshment and sustenance for
the listener who has just experienced the sadness and regret of the Cypress
pieces, and who has yet to face the traumas of the second pair of threnodies.
Liszt met this challenge by composing a work of breathtaking originality,
not only in its use of the keyboard medium but in its harmony, melody, and
form – indeed virtually every aspect of musical structure. It is one of his
finest achievements.
Liszt’s ‘Jeux d’eau’ is no mere feat of dazzling ingenuity, however. Its
true significance is spiritual. For the placement of this wonderful piece as
150 James M. Baker
the centre of a symmetrical layout of seven pieces results in a time-honoured

sacred form dear to J. S. Bach, whom Liszt held in highest esteem – a form
which conveys the central symbol of Christianity: the cross. Liszt’s Années
de pèlerinage, troisième année constitutes a true chiastic form (one based
on the Greek letter chi, traditionally associated with Christ), much like that
of many of Bach’s cantatas, for example the Cantata No. 4, ‘Christ lag in
Todesbanden’, a seven-movement work in which pairs of choruses, duets,
and solos are arranged symmetrically about a central quartet.32
Book III of the Années de pèlerinage is a profound expression of Liszt’s
abiding religious faith. He confronts death directly in four of the seven
pieces, but the work is not ultimately weighed down by these laments. The
two Cypress pieces are morose in tone – the first even approaches a state
of terror – but both conclude in quiet resignation. The threnodies ‘Sunt
lacrymae’ and the ‘Marche funèbre’ are more grim and bitter, perhaps, but
these two end heroically, anticipating the glory of ‘Sursum corda’, The cycle
opens with a piece that projects the innocence of the soul, prior to suffer-
ing life’s hardships. ‘Jeux d’eau’ provides aural and spiritual refreshment
along the way, and ‘Sursum corda’ concludes the journey with a cataclysmic
affirmation of faith.
It is no wonder that Liszt decided to identify this cycle as the third
instalment of a type of collection he had composed decades earlier. The
initial volume of Années de pèlerinage was a series of pieces based essentially
on the life he shared with Marie d’Agoult in Switzerland, and as such they
are bound to an earthly existence. These pieces do not come together to
form a cycle comparable to the late cycles we have examined. In Book II of
the Années, Liszt dramatised his passionate involvement with Italian art and
literature. Concluding with the huge sonata movement portraying Dante’s
Inferno, this set explores Dionysian realms. It is Liszt’s late cycle that realises
an Apollonian concept of pilgrimage, unfolding a narrative of the progress of
the soul toward God. Together the three Books of Années relate the journey
of Liszt’s life, from earthly passions through the transports of art to his
anticipation of death and the glories of the life to come.
Although he was one of the greatest musicians of the nineteenth century,

as a composer Franz Liszt was insecure and humble, and would have never
claimed to be the equal of the composers he idolised – Beethoven and Wag-
ner. In his later years, he would likely have gauged his recent compositions
against the late works of other composers, many of whom had written
their grandest creations later in life – whether Beethoven with his late piano
sonatas and the Ninth Symphony, Wagner with Parsifal, or Chopin with such
innovative works as the Polonaise-Fantaisie – and he would have held out
little hope of approaching their achievements. Yet he continued to compose.
Even in his final months he turned out extrovert music of celebration and
display: waltzes, marches, and brilliant paraphrases of other composers’
works. But his more important compositions – and those which ought to
secure for Liszt recognition as a composer of the first rank – are those which
explore his innermost feelings and recollections, hopes and beliefs. These
unflinching psychological explorations necessitated a music for which
he could not expect to gain much of an audience. He found himself unable
to compose such intimate reflections while working on a large scale in the
standard genres and forms. This music emerged only as brief, intense expres-
sions that left him drained both physically and emotionally. Liszt did not
give up, however, in the attempt to compose works of substance and scope.
Rather, he turned to the cycle as a means of assembling his introspective
inspirations into highly unified major works that attain not only romantic
grandeur but also genuine emotional and spiritual depth. The Via Crucis,
Historical Hungarian Portraits, and the Années de pèlerinage, troisième année
are no mere collections of short pieces. They are works of magisterial sum-
mation that allow us to take part in the pilgrimage of one of music’s great
souls.
7 Liszt’s piano concerti: a lost tradition
a n na ce l e n z a
In 1898 Ferruccio Busoni presented a series of four concerts at the Sing-

Akademie in Berlin on the history of the concerto. In the programme notes
printed as an accompaniment to Busoni’s performances, another pianist,
José Vianna da Motta, explained that the goal of the concerts was to renew
respect for the concerto and to show that, at least in its modern form as rep-
resented by the works of Liszt, the concerto was no longer a genre designed
simply for virtuosic display. At the first concert, Vianna da Motta began his
essay with the following observation:
In most textbooks of musical composition (e.g. Marx’s Kompositionslehre)

the concerto form is described as inferior because the preference for one or
more instruments and the obligation to give the performer the opportunity
to display his skilfulness hinders the composer from letting his art develop
freely.
In reference to the latter point, i.e. letting the soloist’s technique shine by
piling up diverse difficulties, this indeed was the original purpose of the
genre. Even Mozart treated the concerto in this manner . . . Of course now
the concerto has long since outgrown the aim of mere musical games.
Beethoven added the poetic content conferred on his sonatas, quartets and
symphonies to his piano concertos, as is undoubtedly evident in his last two
works in this genre, and Liszt followed him in this endeavour . . . [In the
modern concerto] the piano and the performer are no longer the purpose,
but rather the means to an end.1
Why was such a defence of the concerto, in particular those by Liszt, needed
at the end of the nineteenth century? A possible response is revealed in the
following overview of Liszt’s lifelong interest in the genre and its reception
after his death.
During the first half of the nineteenth century, the piano concerto served
as a pivotal genre in musical culture – the portal to the age of the virtu-
oso. During the second half of the century, however, conflicting tendencies
within audiences’ preferences and the ambitions of composers and per-
formers alike played themselves out through these compositions. The con-
certo, unlike any other concert genre of the era, served as a synthesis of the
soloist and symphonic styles, of compositional traditions dating back to the
Baroque and Classical eras. It was ideally suited to expressing the creative
[152] talents of composer–performers such as Thalberg, Chopin, and Liszt. But
153 Liszt’s piano concerti
its early tradition as a soloist-dominated showpiece made it equally sus-

ceptible to condemnations from critics who viewed the genre as little more
than virtuosic fluff. Such was the fate of the concerto in August Reissmann’s
popular Musikalisches Conversations-Lexicon in 1880.2 Lamenting that the
widespread misuse of the concerto was responsible for hindering the spread
of a ‘refined aesthetic taste’, Reissmann claimed that the contemporary con-
certo repertory was dominated by works empty of content and that it had
become a prisoner of salon-style artifice and formulaic virtuosity. The con-
certo was seen as having failed to live up to the highest ideals of form and
spirit associated with instrumental music.3
Reissmann’s dismissal of the concerto was only one of many in the second
half of the nineteenth century, and the effect of such criticism, especially
in connection with the concerti of Liszt, was no doubt felt by virtuosic
pianists such as Busoni, who sensed that respect for their most coveted
genre was slowly ebbing away. Busoni and Vianna da Motta tried to ‘save’
the piano concerto at the end of the nineteenth century, but their efforts had
only a short-lived effect. For most of the twentieth century, music scholars
shied away from the concerto, preferring to focus their attention instead
on what were viewed as more serious instrumental genres – the symphony,
string quartet, and sonata. Although the last decade has witnessed a growing
interest in the piano concerto of the nineteenth century, in general it can be
described as a ‘lost tradition’ in musical scholarship.4 Therefore, the goal of
this chapter is to show how the piano concerti of Liszt fit into the concerto
tradition of the nineteenth century and, in many ways, reflected its evolution
and eventual disregard.
By the time Busoni and Vianna da Motta presented their history of the
concerto concert series in 1898, the genre could roughly be divided into
three distinct types: the virtuoso concerto, the symphonic concerto, and
the programmatic concerto. Although some concerti contained character-
istics associated with more than one of these categories, in general the lines
of division between the three types were fairly clear. As Vianna da Motta
explained in the excerpt above, the purpose of the earliest form of the
genre, the virtuoso concerto, was to show off the talents of the soloist. The
structure generally followed that inherited from the Classical era, i.e. three
movements arranged fast – slow – fast, and the layout of at least the first
movement usually adhered to sonata form. In the second style of the genre,
the symphonic concerto, the dominance of the soloist was lessened, mak-
ing room for a more involved orchestral presence and greater interaction
between the soloist and other instruments. In this style, the structural form
varied substantially. For example, some composers, most notably Brahms,
continued to use sonata form and follow the traditional multi-movement
structure. These concerti are symphonic in that they present a prominent
154 Anna Celenza
role for the piano and orchestra together. In fact, Brahms’s concerti were
generally considered to be little more than ‘disguised’ symphonies. Other
symphonic concertos, such as Weber’s Konzertstuck, and the final versions of
Liszt’s Piano Concerti Nos. 1 and 2, consisted of several movements linked
together or one movement made up of contrasting sections. The technique
of thematic transformation played a major role in many of these works,
and the inherent dramatic character created through this technique soon
led to the development of the third style of the concerto, the programmatic
concerto. Following the lead of the symphonic concerto, the programmatic
version made greater use of the orchestra and abandoned the confines of
sonata form. Its structure tended to be determined by a pre-conceived pro-
gramme and/or extra-musical ideas.
Of all the composer-performers of the nineteenth century, Liszt appears
to have been the only one who composed works in all three concerto
styles. Beginning his career as a flamboyant performer and ending it as
a well-respected composer of serious orchestral works, Liszt used the piano
concerto as a bridge between these two sides of his musical identity. His
numerous autographs of the concerti reveal that he returned to them time
and again, making comprehensive revisions as his conception of the genre
changed. As one scholar recently noted, the piano concerto served as Liszt’s
‘laboratory’ wherein he ‘tested and refined’ his compositional techniques.5
Liszt only published three piano concerti during his lifetime (Piano Con-
certo No.1 in E Major in 1857, Piano Concerto No. 2 in A Minor in 1861, and
Totentanz in 1865), but he worked on these pieces throughout his career and
preceded them with a considerable number of unpublished works including
two piano concerti in 1825 and two quasi-programmatic pieces for piano
and orchestra in 1834. In addition to these, Liszt composed numerous fan-
tasies and transcriptions for piano and orchestra of other composers’ works.
For example, the Niobe Fantasy was first conceived for piano and orchestra,
and there was a concerto version of the Puritani Fantasy as well as Hexaméron
(Table 7.1).
The virtuoso concerti

Liszt’s first attempt at writing piano concerti took place in 1825, when as
a fourteen-year-old prodigy he was trying to make his mark as a virtuoso
pianist. In a letter dated 14 August 1825, Adam Liszt wrote to Czerny about
his son’s most recent accomplishments:
Franzi has written two good concerti, which will be heard in Vienna . . . he
knows no other passion than the compositions, only these grant him joy
Table 7.1 Chronology of Liszt’s piano concerti and related works for piano and orchestra
Date started Title Revisions Date completed/published
1825 Two piano concerti lost

1832 Piano Concerto No. 1 in E Major 1834/35, 1855/7
1839, 1849,
1853, 1855,
1833 Malédiction 1840 unpublished
1834 Grande fantaisie symphonique 1834/1981
1834 De profundis, psaume instrumental incomplete/1989
1835 Concerto? (uses themes from 3 solo piano pieces incomplete/1989
published in 1825: ‘Huit Variations’, ‘Allegro
di bravura’, and Rondo di bravura’)
1837 Hexaméron published 1839
1839 Piano Concerto No. 2 in A Minor 1849, 1853, 1861/3
1857
1839 Totentanz 1849, 1853, 1864/1865
1857, 1864
1841 Grand paraphrase de concert ‘God Save the Queen’ unpublished
‘Rule Britannia’
1848 Fantasie über Motive aus Ruinen von Athen 1852 published 1865
1849 Polonaise brillante von Weber [op. 17] published 1851
1849 Fantasie über ungarische Volksmelodien 1852/4
1851 Franz Schuberts grosse Fantasie op. 15 published 1857
1880 Concerto No. 3 incomplete
and pleasure . . . His concerti are too severe, and the difficulties for the
soloist are monstrous; I have always considered Hummel’s concerti difficult,
but in comparison these are very easy.6
Except for a few brief sketches identified several years ago,7 the above descrip-
tion is all that remains of Liszt’s first two concerti, despite the fact that
contemporary sources indicate that at least one of them, a concerto in A
minor, was performed in London on 9 June 1827.8 Adam Liszt’s description
of the works indicates that their primary purpose was to display his son’s
technical skills, and so it is safe to assume that they fell under the category
of the virtuoso concerto.
The same can be said for Liszt’s next attempt at the genre several years
later. In January 1832 Liszt jotted down several themes for what would later
become his Concerto No. 1 in E Major. Scattered across several pages of
a composition notebook dating from the early 1830s, these sketches reveal
Liszt’s first conception of the piece.9 Music from the opening bars of the
concerto is presented in the first sketch, where the key and much of the
rhythm and harmony appear in a manner similar to the final version. The rest
of the sketches notated under the heading ‘concerto’ appear to continue in
the keys of E and B major and carry descriptive labels such as ‘Trompe’,
‘Chant’, and ‘Marche Finale’.10 These sketches are all that exist of Liszt’s
first concept for the E Major Concerto, but he obviously worked on the
composition consistently for several months, for at the end of the year, in a
156 Anna Celenza
letter dated 12 December, he wrote: ‘I have laboured at length and prepared

many instrumental compositions, among others . . . a Concerto after a design
that I think is new, and for which the accompaniments remain for me to
write.’11
No sources for this first draft of the concerto are known to exist, but
an idea of what Liszt described as ‘new’ can be determined by studying a
manuscript copy of the work prepared in 1834/5.12 Although several pages
are missing from this manuscript, enough exists to get a sense of the work’s
overall structure and unique features. Echoing the scope and key structure
of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, op. 73, Liszt’s work is scored for a rel-
atively modest orchestra of double winds and brass (flute, oboe, clarinet,
bassoon, horn, and trumpet), timpani and strings and cast in three sep-
arate movements: Allegro, Adagio, and Vivace. The second movement is
in B major and, as in Beethoven’s concerto, linked to a scherzo-like finale.
Although the technical demands on the orchestra are not great in Liszt’s
concerto, those put on the soloist are immense. For example the open-
ing measures of the piano part contain rapid leaps covering two octaves.
These are followed by the introduction of numerous new motives, which
are later expanded upon in a fantasia-like manner, and an excessive amount
of performance indications (e.g. Marcato deciso, Vigoroso, and Delicato).
Throughout the exposition, the piano guides the orchestra through numer-
ous modulations: E major, E major, F major, and B minor. A measured
cadenza then leads to the development, which instead of expanding upon
thematic material from the exposition introduces three new themes, the
last of which is written in fugato style. In the lengthy retransition to the
tonic, Liszt introduces another new key, C minor, before presenting what
appears to be a loose recapitulation based on the first two new themes of
the development and a return of the opening motive marked fortississis-
simo. Unfortunately, the manuscript breaks off at this point, leaving one to
speculate how the movement might have concluded.13
The second movement has a rather unusual form. Approximately seventy
bars in length, it is punctuated throughout with recitative-like interruptions
marked Recitando. The opening theme is the same one that appears in Liszt’s
final version of the concerto. Marked Adagio in the 1834/5 version, its clear,
lyrical structure betrays the influence of Italian bel canto tradition. That
being said, one cannot help but wonder if Spohr’s Violin Concerto No. 8 in
A Minor, op. 47 (1816), entitled Gesangsszene (‘in modo di scena cantante’),
served as a model. Although Spohr’s concerto is rarely performed today, it
was popular during the first half of the nineteenth century and likely famil-
iar to Liszt. Liszt’s use of descriptive labels such as ‘Trompe’, ‘Chant’, and
‘Marche Finale’ in his 1832 sketches for the piano concerto indicate that
from the beginning, he envisioned some sort of dramatic structure for the
work, and a comparison of the 1834/5 version with Spohr’s concerto reveals
several telling similarities. The structure of Liszt’s second movement bor-
rows much from the ‘Gesangsszene’ structure of Spohr’s ground-breaking
concerto, and in both the soloist takes on the role of a virtuosic singer in
aria and recitative, while the orchestra offers little more than an accompa-
niment. Yet another model for the second movement could have been Ignaz
Moscheles’s Piano Concerto in G Minor, op. 60 (completed in 1820), which
also employs elements of recitative.
The principal theme of the third movement is the same one that appears
in the E minor scherzo (Allegro vivace) in the final published version of the
concerto. Perhaps the most interesting feature of this movement is the return
of the second movement’s Adagio theme. Instead of facilitating the entry
of a second key area and subsequent move to a recapitulation, the interpo-
lation of this theme halts the movement’s forward drive and moves directly
into an extensive coda that reaffirms the major key and features a return of
the original scherzo theme.
As the above description reveals, the structure and technical difficulty
of the 1834/5 version of the Piano Concerto in E Major places it squarely
in the category of the virtuoso concerto. Still, there are elements of the
composition that fall outside this category – elements that Liszt himself
described as ‘new’. The avoidance of strict sonata form, the fantasia-like
opening movement, the use of instrumental recitative, the linking together
of the second and third movements, and the unity of structure created by a
free and continuous restatement of themes – Liszt’s innovative use of these
features suggests that he was striving to create something more than just
a virtuosic showpiece when he composed the original version of his piano
concerto. Liszt was taking the first steps toward a new style of concerto
writing. To better understand the direction in which he was moving, it is
worth examining two additional works composed for piano and orchestra
in 1834/5.
Grande fantaisie symphonique and De profundis

Around the time Liszt completed the 1834/5 version of the Piano Con-
certo No. 1 in E Major, he composed two quasi-programmatic works for
piano and orchestra that reveal his earliest attempts to construct large, uni-
fied single-movement structures. Although these works do not fall squarely
under the category of concerto, they nonetheless represent an important
stage in Liszt’s conception of the genre, for they contain many of the com-
positional characteristics and poetic qualities that would ultimately define
the final versions of Liszt’s three piano concerti.
158 Anna Celenza
The first of these, the Grande fantaisie symphonique, is a paraphrase of two

of the six numbers from Berlioz’s Le retour à la vie, mélologue en six parties
that was later retitled Lélio, ou Le retour à la vie, monodrama lyrique (Liszt’s
adaptation is sometimes listed as the Lélio Fantasy). Formally, the Grande
fantaisie symphonique consists of one long movement (670 bars) divided
into two halves – the first, Lento (bars 1–184), and the second, Allegro vivace
(bars 185–670). The piece represents Liszt’s earliest experimentation with
a format consisting of a slow introductory section followed by a bravura
Allegro, and it is likely that he looked to several models for this form, the most
obvious being Weber’s Konzertstück and Mendelssohn’s Capriccio brillant,
op. 22. Clara Wieck’s Piano Concerto, op. 7 is another possible model, since
she performed two of the movements, the ‘Romanze’ and ‘Finale’, as a pair
in many of her concerts.14
The first half of Liszt’s Grande fantaisie symphonique serves as a long
introduction to the second half. Primarily in A minor, it is a paraphrase of
the opening song, ‘Le pêcheur’, from Berlioz’s composition. The second half
of Liszt’s piece begins and ends in F major and is based on the third song
from Lélio, ‘Chanson de brigands’. But Liszt does not draw his thematic
material from this song alone; in an effort to create structural unity, he
recalls a theme from the first section of the piece. Further unification of the
two parts is created by the incorporation of a similar rhythmic motive in
both halves taken from ‘Choeur d’ombres’, yet another song from Berlioz’s
composition.
The second of the two concerted works, De profundis (psaume instrumen-
tal), was dedicated to the Abbé de Lamennais and, like the Grande fantaisie
symphonique, is a single-movement work. In a letter to his mother dated 26
July 1835, Liszt referred to De profundis as a concerto symphonique.15 This
differentiation in name supports the assumption that Liszt was striving
towards the creation of a new genre for piano and orchestra in the mid-
1830s. Cast in large-scale sonata form, De profundis consists of an exposi-
tion, lengthy development, scherzo-like interlude, and a recapitulation that
serves as a segue into a concluding section that contains the first traces
of Liszt’s experiments with thematic transformation. In this work, Liszt’s
aptitude for constructing a large, unified movement has progressed notice-
ably. In addition to demonstrating his ability to resolve a tonal dichotomy
efficiently, the work displays an effective use of thematic duality and a con-
vincing recapitulation. Liszt never completed De profundis, despite the fact
that the autograph score – the only known source for the work – contains at
least two layers of revision. But he did hold on to the score and in later years
incorporated a large section of it into an early version of his Totentanz –
a topic to which we shall return.
Liszt never published Grande fantaisie symphonique and De profundis,

although he did perform the former on at least two occasions: the premiere
on 9 April 1835 with conductor Narcisse Girard and a performance on 18
December 1836 with Berlioz on the podium. Reviews of these performances
were mixed. Although the magnificence of Liszt’s virtuosic talent was univer-
sally praised, his skills as a composer were often dismissed without comment
or harshly criticised.16 Unable to separate his identity as a performer from his
activities as an orchestral composer in the eyes of reviewers, Liszt apparently
became frustrated with the concerto genre and subsequently abandoned it
for several years. Only in 1839, with the prospect of a new concert tour
looming before him, did he turn his attention to the genre once again.
The symphonic concerti

After leaving Paris in 1834 and living with the Countess Marie d’Agoult
in Switzerland and Italy for five years, Liszt decided to resume his concert
career in the fall of 1839. In preparation for the tour, he spent the month
of September in Italy preparing a number of works for his upcoming tours.
Among these compositions were his Piano Concerto No. 1 in E Major and
the Piano Concerto No. 2 in A Minor.
Liszt drastically revised his E Major Concerto when he returned to it
in 1839, and his own works from 1834/5, namely the Grande fantaisie and
De profundis, served as his most important models. Intent on turning his
three-movement virtuoso concerto into a more serious symphonic work,
Liszt cut the concerto’s length by one third, simplified several of the more
technically challenging sections in the soloist’s part and completely restruc-
tured the work, turning it into a single-movement concerto constructed of
four contrasting sections: ‘Allegro’, ‘Quasi adagio’, a scherzo-like ‘Allegretto
vivace’, and ‘Allegro animato’.17 In its new form, the Concerto No. 1 in E
Major looked more like a symphonic concerto than a virtuoso concerto.
It is tempting to view Liszt’s revisions of the work as a replication of, if
not an actual reaction to, some of Robert Schumann’s musings about the
genre published in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. For example, in a review
published in 1836 Schumann criticised the structure of Moscheles’s Piano
Concerto No. 6 in B Major, op. 90 (the Concert fantastique), and then
proposed a new one-movement structure for the concerto:
The Concert fantastique consists of four movements, continued without

pause, but in different tempos. We have already declared ourselves opposed
to this form. Though it does not seem impossible to construct an agreeable
unity in it, the aesthetic dangers appear too great in comparison with this
160 Anna Celenza
possibility. Still, there is a lack of smaller concert pieces, wherein the

virtuoso can simultaneously give us his presentation of an allegro, adagio,
and rondo. It would be good to invent a new form that consists of one large
movement in a moderate tempo, wherein the preparatory part might take
the place of a first allegro, the cantabile that of the adagio and a brilliant
conclusion that of the rondo. Perhaps this idea will inspire something that
we would gladly see embodied in a peculiarly original composition.18
Liszt no doubt took these ideas to heart and responded to them the fol-
lowing year in a review of some of Schumann’s piano music, in particular
his sonata entitled ‘Concerto without Orchestra’. In his review, Liszt con-
templated the history of the concerto, explaining that although the genre
had originally conformed to the structure of three separate movements,
Moscheles had recently united the various movements into one in his Con-
cert fantastique, op. 90 and thus laid the groundwork for the future. Accord-
ing to Liszt, the best concertos were those that presented a free treatment of
traditional form.19 Weber’s Konzertstück and Mendelssohn’s Capriccio bril-
lant had already made progress in this direction, and as Liszt’s 1839 revision
of his own Piano Concerto in E Major would soon show, he intended to
follow along a similar path.
Although Liszt was not the first to compose a single-movement piano
concerto along the lines of Schumann’s description, his continued interest
in this form led to some of the most innovative uses of it in the nineteenth
century. Shortly after completing the 1839 version of his Concerto No. 1,
Liszt composed the first draft of another single-movement concerto, his
Concerto No. 2 in A Minor – an even better example of the symphonic
variety.
The second concerto is less brilliant, less virtuosic than the first con-
certo, but far more original in form, and in this respect it reveals a closer
link to the style and structure of Liszt’s more popular tone poems. Similar
in structure to Carl Maria von Weber’s Konzertstück (1829), a work Liszt
performed regularly in concerts,20 the Concerto in A Minor comprises six
sections, each of which presents a contrasting mood created by what can
only be described as ‘ingenious thematic transformations’.21 This technique
of thematic metamorphosis – creating themes of highly diverse character
through the use of a single melodic shape – is quite similar to that found
in Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy, and it is likely that Schubert’s work also
served as a model. Liszt no doubt knew the work by 1839, for Schubert
completed it shortly before his first encounter with Liszt in 1822. By 1846
Liszt was performing the Wanderer Fantasy in concerts on a regular basis,
and in 1851 he even went so far as to make an arrangement of it for piano
and orchestra – yet another indication that he viewed Schubert’s solo piano
work as a model for the concerto genre.22
In terms of the soloist’s role, the Concerto in A Minor is quite different

from its predecessor. Whereas the revised version of the first concerto could
still be considered a soloist’s showpiece, the second reflects Liszt’s attempt to
confirm his talent as a composer and distance himself from his performance
origins.23 In the second concerto Liszt is sparing with technical devices such
as scales in octaves and contrary motion, making the soloist a responsive
accompanist to the woodwinds and strings rather than an overbearing vir-
tuoso. In addition, the soloist does not dominate the thematic material.
After the opening, the pianist never has the theme again in its original form.
Instead, his duty is to create – or at least appear to create – inventive varia-
tions that lead the listener through a series of thematic transformations. As
the pianist Alfred Brendel once noted, in the second concerto there is a frag-
mentary openness to the form that gives the work as a whole a poetic sense.
The various pauses and silences are not envisioned as breaks in the musical
flow, but rather transitions in the musical argument. ‘Organic unity’ gives
a structure to the entire work.24
In manuscript, Liszt called his Piano Concerto in A Minor a concerto
symphonique, the label he had previously applied to De profundis. In the past,
Liszt’s use of this term has been attributed to the influence of Henry Litolff
(1818–91), a performer–composer he met in 1840 and the eventual dedicatee
of his Piano Concerto No. 1. Litolff published four concertos symphoniques
between 1844 and 1867, which has led to the assumption that he was the
first to envision such a genre. But as we have seen, Liszt was already using
the term regularly in the 1830s, and his early drafts of De profundis and the
Concerto in A Minor show that he designed a general layout for the concerto
symphonique several years before Litolff did. Although Liszt did not publish
or publicly perform the early versions of his concertos, he likely showed them
to Litolff, or at least discussed them with him at some point during their
friendly interaction in the 1840s. In later years, Litolff earned a reputation as
a respected interpreter of Liszt’s piano works. In fact, Liszt himself praised
the pianist’s performance of his Concerto in E Major after hearing it at a
private gathering in 1853, an event that likely influenced Liszt in his decision
to dedicate the work to Litolff. Liszt’s influence on Litolff is undeniable,
as a comparison of the two composers’ works reveals: both make use of
repeated themes and thematic transformation, both often feature difficult
octave passages at the conclusions of sections, and both incorporate the
triangle and piccolo into the orchestra (as first seen in the 1839 draft of
Liszt’s Concerto No. 1 and used by Litolff in his Concerto symphonique No. 4
in D Minor composed in 1851/2). There are, however, several differences
between the two composers’ approach to the genre, and these differences
might have influenced Liszt in his decision to drop the designation concerto
symphonique from his own works when he finally began publishing them
162 Anna Celenza
in the late 1850s and 60s. In general, Litolff’s works are more closely tied to
a four-movement structure and traditional use of sonata form. In addition,
he gives the piano a much less important role. In fact, Litolff’s concerti, like
those of Brahms, are really nothing more than disguised symphonies with
a piano accompaniment, a characterisation that could never be applied to
Liszt’s concerti.
For reasons still unknown, Liszt decided to shelve both of his concerti
when he resumed touring in the fall of 1839. In fact, ten years passed before
he returned to the works and completed another set of revisions.25 As Jay
Rosenblatt explains, these manuscripts reveal ‘how close the 1849 versions
brought the concertos to their final form, especially with regard to tonal
layout and the use of thematic transformation’.26 In the 1849 version of the
Concerto No. 1, Liszt cyclically unified the first and last movements in a
manner similar to that found in the 1839 version of the A Minor Concerto,
and in later years he went one step further, recalling thematic material
from every movement in the concerto’s finale. By the time the Concerto in
E Major was published in 1857, it had undergone five revisions, in 1835,
1839, 1849, 1853 and 1855. The Concerto in A Minor went through a similar
process, in 1849, 1853, 1857 and 1861. Faced with so many revisions, one
cannot help but ask: why? Was Liszt really such a perfectionist? The answer
to this question is yes and no. Liszt knew that winning the support of critics
would be an uphill battle, and he was wary of presenting the ‘final’ versions
of his concerti for public scrutiny, as is reflected in the anecdote that he
and Hans von Bülow once set the words ‘Das versteht ihr alle nicht, haha!’
(This none of you understand, ha! ha!) to the opening two bars of the
Concerto No. 1. But Liszt’s primary purpose in writing the concerti was not
to win public favour, but rather to grow as a composer. With each step of the
revision process, Liszt tightened the relationship between the soloist and the
orchestra, and in doing so refined his conception of what a piano concerto
should be. His revisions were not the result of a quest for the perfect concerto,
but stemmed instead from his quest for creative growth.27 Liszt’s ideas about
the piano concerto changed drastically over the years, a phenomenon that
is fascinating to follow and perhaps best shown through the evolution of his
final concerto, the programmatic work entitled Totentanz.
The programmatic concerto

The programmatic dimensions that the piano concerto took on in the nine-
teenth century, including the appropriation of visual and theatrical effects as
compositional devices, are clearly displayed in Liszt’s Totentanz.28 Using as
inspiration two works of visual art, Holbein’s Todtentanz woodcut series and
a thirteenth-century fresco in Pisa called Trionfo della Morte, Liszt composed
two musical sketches in 1839 that he called ‘Comedy of Death’ and ‘Triumph
of Death’. It is not clear if Liszt originally envisioned these sketches as sep-

arate compositions; a memo in one of his notebooks dating from the mid-
1840s reveals that he considered using them in an early draft of Années
de pèlerinage.29 Liszt soon abandoned this idea, however, and in 1848 the
sketches were used in a large concert work for piano and orchestra called
Totentanz. Liszt edited this draft considerably in 1849 and again in 1853.
The 1853 version was then bound in leather, an indication that Liszt con-
sidered Totentanz to be complete at the time.30 But the concerto was never
performed in this version during Liszt’s lifetime, and in 1864 Liszt returned
to the work and edited it heavily, changing the orchestration and delet-
ing several sections. In this state, the concerto was premièred by Hans von
Bülow in 1865 and finally published under the title: Totentanz, paraphrase
über ‘Dies Irae’.
In its final form Totentanz is an elaborate set of free variations based on the
liturgical plainchant ‘Dies Irae’ and an excerpt from the opening of Mozart’s
Requiem. Following a short orchestral introduction and a statement of the
theme by the piano, a set of five numbered variations begins. Variations
1–3 are not labelled, but the fourth and fifth are classified as ‘canonique’
and ‘fugato’. Approximately three-quarters of the way through the piece the
‘Dies Irae’ drops out and a new eight-note theme taken from the opening
of Mozart’s Requiem appears and serves as the basis for an unnumbered
second set of variations. In the third and final cadenza the original ‘Dies
Irae’ theme returns and remains the dominant force until the end of the
piece (Fig 7.1).
A look at the primary sources for Totentanz reveals that the evolution of
the piece was long and arduous. In each stage of revision, Liszt was careful
to preserve the unique characteristics of the two artworks that inspired his
composition. To fully understand how he accomplished this preservation,
we must turn briefly to the artworks themselves. Hans Holbein’s woodcut
series Todtentanz presents a pictorial version of a theme and variations. The
formal theme of the series – the Equality of Death (Plate 7.1) – is presented
by a ghoulish band of skeletons who declare to humanity that death will
surely come to all:
Woe! Woe! Inhabitants of Earth

Where blighting cares so keenly strike,
And, spite of rank, or wealth, or worth,
Death – Death will visit all alike.31
Holbein’s variations on this theme are presented in the remaining thirty-

five woodcuts. Here the skeletons fulfil their declaration of death by seizing
individuals from all walks of life and ushering them to their forewarned
demise. Figures from the Church are particularly susceptible to the bony
hand of death: pope, priest, cardinal, abbot, monk, nun, etc. are punished
Figure 7.1 Outline of Liszt’s Totentanz
b b
b
b b b b b
‘Dies Irae’ ‘Dies Irae’
‘ecclesiastical’
‘ ’
‘Dies Irae’
Plate 7.1 ‘The Equality of Death’ from Hans Holbein’s Todtentanz.
for the sins of humanity. The final two woodcuts show the Last Judgement,
where all the figures from the previous images return to hear God’s final
decree, and the Escutcheon of Death.
The Trionfo della Morte fresco located in Pisa’s Campo Santo has three
primary scenes (Plate 7.2). The left side of the fresco shows a representation
Plate 7.2 Trionfo della Morte, by Orcagna [sic] (Francesco Traini or Bonamico Buffalmacco).
of the medieval legend of ‘The Three Dead and the Three Living’. Accord-
ing to this story, three noble youths were hunting in a forest when they
were intercepted by three images of Death. Here the dead are displayed in
their coffins in varying stages of decay. The dead pheasants and hunting
instruments reveal the pastime of the noblemen and their servants. On the
right side of the fresco is a memento mori image symbolising the ephemeral
quality of life. Here a group of young lovers play musical instruments in a
lush and flowering garden. The scene in the centre of the fresco represents
humanity’s fate after death. A witch-like depiction of Death flies through
the air, wielding a scythe over her victims below. As life leaves each human,
swarms of angels and devils descend on the bodies and battle over their
souls. Here humanity’s fate is both certain and horrific.
Although a theme and variations structure was not one commonly used
by Liszt for orchestral works, its application in Totentanz seems logical when
compared to the woodcut series by Holbein. Just as skeletons represent
Death in Holbein’s work, the liturgical sequence ‘Dies Irae’ served as the
haunting theme for Liszt. A look at the various versions of Totentanz reveals
that Liszt quoted directly from Holbein’s woodcuts at every stage of the
concerto’s evolution. Close examination of Holbein’s theme woodcut shows
skeletons playing a variety of instruments (cornemuse, busine, hurdy-gurdy,
shawm), but the sackbut and kettledrums are given the most prominent
positions. I emphasise this point because if we look at the opening of Liszt’s
1849 version of Totentanz, we find an accurate quotation of this striking
orchestration. Here Liszt replaced the sackbut and kettledrums with their
nineteenth-century equivalents, the trombone and timpani (Plate 7.3). In
the final version of Totentanz, completed in 1865, Liszt reorchestrated the
opening, amplifying the timpani and trombones with clarinets, bassoons,
violas, cellos and contrabasses. In this revised version, the timpani play
F, G, B, G – a figure framed by the interval of a tritone, the ‘diabolus
musicae’. The piano emphasises this tritone motive, which appears in two
forms: linearly as a motive and horizontally as a diminished seventh chord:
G, B, D, F. These two tritone manifestations, linear motive and horizontal
chord, appear throughout the composition and serve as unifying devices as
well as symbols of the diabolical.
Paying close attention to Holbein’s satirical treatment of religious figures,
Liszt adopted a similar approach when writing Variation 4. Liszt labelled
the variation ‘canonique’, and this indication, along with the music’s sacred
style, reveals a direct connection to contemporary church music. On the
surface, Variation 4 appears quite benign, but a close look at its harmonic
structure reveals malevolent elements, the most obvious being Liszt’s blatant
use of the tritone.
168 Anna Celenza
Plate 7.3 First page of Liszt’s 1849 version of Totentanz (New York), Pierpont Morgan Library, Lehman Collection.
Variation 5 might also be considered an imitation of Holbein. Labelled

‘fugato’, it is the longest and most complex variation. Although it contains
no direct quotations of the previous four variations, the ‘fugato’ does make
use of the various rhythmic motives that characterise them. Like the ‘Last
Judgement’ in Holbein’s woodcuts, Variation 5 presents a conclusive com-
bination of all the preceding variations.
Despite the striking similarities between Liszt’s Totentanz and Holbein’s
woodcuts, there are several contradictions that imply an additional source of
extra-musical inspiration. For example, why did Liszt interrupt Variation
5 with a new set of theme and variations? The answer lies in the Trionfo
della Morte fresco in Pisa’s Campo Santo. In a letter to Hector Berlioz,
Liszt once made a comparison between the Campo Santo and Mozart’s
Requiem, saying that he was reminded of the Requiem when he entered the
Campo Santo. Consequently, when Liszt began to compose music inspired
by the Trionfo della Morte fresco in 1839 he used an excerpt from Mozart’s
Requiem. Liszt clearly recognised the similarity between the opening melody
in Mozart’s Requiem and the melody of the seventeenth-century folia –
sometimes called ‘Farinelli’s Ground’. In an effort to create what he believed
to be an ‘early music’ sound, Liszt used the harmonic structure of the folia
when creating aural depictions of the thirteenth-century fresco. The hunting
scene displayed in the legend of ‘The Three Dead and the Three Living’ is
represented by horn calls in the opening statement of the second theme.
Likewise, the group of lovers playing instruments in the garden is depicted
in the first variation of the second theme. Perhaps difficult to interpret at
first, Liszt’s decision to insert a second theme and variations set in Totentanz
was an outstanding manipulation of programmatic material. Within the
climactic presentation of the ‘Last Judgement’ in Variation 5, Liszt included
his second programme, the ‘Triumph of Death’, and thus intensified the
composition’s dramatic conclusion and final descent into Hell.
In the earliest complete versions of Totentanz, those created in 1849
and 1853, the second theme and variations was followed by a third theme,
the ‘De profundis’ plainchant from his 1834/5 composition. If we can rely
on the liturgical texts that usually accompanied these three themes as an
approximate programme for Totentanz, then it appears that the 1849 and
1853 versions depicted a more benevolent vision of God’s Last Judgement.
The text to ‘Dies Irae’ set the scene: ‘Day of anger, day of misery, when the
world turned to ashes.’ This was followed by the Requiem theme: ‘Give them
eternal rest, Lord.’ Finally the redemptive text of the ‘De profundis’, Psalm
130, concluded the programme.
After completing the 1853 version of Totentanz, Liszt set the work aside
for eleven years. When he finally returned to it in 1864 at the request of his
son-in-law Hans von Bülow, his vision of the concerto’s programme had
170 Anna Celenza
darkened considerably. Liszt had suffered numerous personal tragedies dur-

ing the intervening years, and these had temporarily changed his view of the
world, making him depressed and introspective. In 1863 Liszt moved into
the Dominican residence, Madonna del Rosario, in Rome, and it was there
that he revised Totentanz for the last time, transforming it into a cynical con-
demnation of mankind. He did this by making four fundamental changes
to the concerto: he reorchestrated the opening, added the demonic tritone
motives, eliminated the benevolent ‘De profundis’ section, and rewrote the
coda, making it more malevolent in character.
Liszt’s disparaging view of the world around him was not permanent,
however. And one gets the sense that shortly after publishing Totentanz,
Liszt began to regret how much it reflected his own struggles and private
thoughts. Vladimir Stasov’s description of an encounter he had with Liszt
in 1869 elucidates the situation:
In vain I implored him to play something from his Totentanz . . . To no avail
I asked him to explain the principal variations in Totentanz, for which no
programme is given (contrary to the practice Liszt has followed in all his
symphonic works). He flatly refused to play this piece, and as for the
programme, he said only that it was one of those works whose content must
not be made public. A strange secret, a strange exception, the strange effect
of his life as an abbé and his stay in Rome!32
After the publication of Totentanz, Liszt realised that the personality cult
associated with the concerto made it a losing enterprise for him. He had
struggled most of his career to remove his identity as a performer from
his piano concerti – but with little success. Although he could downplay
the virtuosic role of the soloist as he did in Concerti Nos. 1 and 2, and
refrain from performing the works himself as he did in Concerto No. 2
and Totentanz, he could never fully separate his personality from the genre.
Performers such as Busoni and Vianna da Motta lamented the abandonment
of the concerto at the end of the nineteenth century, but an understanding
of the genre’s tradition reveals why composers such as Liszt were left with
no other choice. Although Liszt made sketches for a new concerto in 1880
after Reissmann blamed misuse of the genre for hindering the spread of
a ‘refined aesthetic taste’, nothing came of these plans. Thus we are left to
conclude that, intent on becoming a great composer in the eyes of critics
and audiences, Liszt was forced to separate himself from the concerto – a
genre that would always remind listeners of his glittering, virtuosic past.
8 Performing Liszt’s piano music
ke n n e t h h a m i lto n
It was interesting to note the varied degrees of tension that he brought to the different composers.
When Chopin was being played, only the most delicate precision would satisfy him. The rubatos
had to be done with exquisite restraint, and only when Chopin had marked them, never ad
libitum. Nothing was quite good enough to interpret such perfection. A student played one of
Liszt’s own Rhapsodies; it had been practised conscientiously, but did not satisfy the master. There
were splashy arpeggios and rockets of rapidly ascending chromatic diminished sevenths. ‘Why
don’t you play it this way?’, asked Liszt, sitting at the second piano and playing the passage with
more careless bravura. ‘It was not written so in my copy’ , objected the youth. ‘Oh, you need not
take that so literally’ , answered the composer.1
This dialogue between Liszt and a pupil with surprisingly modern attitudes
from an 1877 masterclass in Rome presents in a nutshell one fundamental
problem in the interpretation of his piano music, namely, how essential, or
even advisable, is strict adherence to the letter of the score. An associated
problem concerns the spirit of the score: how did Liszt expect his music
to sound, and what interpretative approach should we adopt if we wish
to respect this? We could well argue – and this would ironically be a typ-
ical nineteenth-century view – that Liszt performance in the twenty-first
century ought to be moulded by modern concert conditions, instruments
and expectations, and not those of a bygone era. But even if this attitude is
adopted, it is surely better adopted on the basis of knowledge of what we
are rejecting, rather than as a merely plausible substitute for ignorance. The
following pages address issues in Liszt performance by briefly discussing
Liszt’s aesthetic outlook, the pianos he used, his playing style and the legacy
of his teaching. There exists a large body of material – some written, some
recorded – that not only amplifies, but sometimes contradicts, instructions
in Liszt’s scores. In fact, even to talk about ‘the score’ in the case of many
Liszt pieces is problematical, as many exist in a multiplicity of versions with
differences ranging from minor nuances to major reworkings. As Liszt him-
self put it in 1863, ‘The fact is that the passion for variants, and for what
seems to me to be ameliorations of style, has got a particular grip on me and
gets stronger with age.’2 In view of this, it should not cause astonishment
that Liszt’s attitudes to textual fidelity and to performance were complex
and occasionally contradictory.
[171]
172 Kenneth Hamilton
Performance aesthetics
As might be expected of any musician, Liszt’s views on interpretation
changed significantly as he grew older. In 1837 he had turned his thoughts
publicly to the role of the performing musician in recreating works of art:
The poet, painter or sculptor, left to himself in his study or studio, completes
the task he has set himself; and once his work is done, he has bookshops to
distribute it or museums to exhibit it. There is no intermediary between
himself and his judges, whereas the composer is necessarily forced to have
recourse to inept or indifferent interpreters who make him suffer through
interpretations that are often literal, it is true, but which are quite imperfect
when it comes to presenting the work’s ideas or the composer’s genius.3
In other words, written music is only the transcription of an idea that

requires a performer for realisation. The inevitably inexact and lifeless nota-
tion can never delineate every aspect of that music adequately, leaving its fate
substantially at the mercy of the performer’s talent or understanding.
The performing information contained in a score varies massively from
era to era and composer to composer. A Bach Prelude may contain noth-
ing but the notes and time signature, a piece like Grainger’s Rosenkavalier
Ramble may try to give directions that extend to the minutest details of
tempo fluctuation and layered dynamics. Even the latter falls short of what
is required to create living, breathing music rather than a stiff, mechani-
cal sequence of notes. Most performers nowadays take it as axiomatic that,
however important their role, it should be limited to relaying as accurately
as possible the composition as they believe the composer intended it; they
should attempt to subsume their individuality in that of the composer. To
do this completely is impossible, but the aim of sympathetic accuracy is
usually there.
Nineteenth-century pianists were also well aware that they had a respon-
sibility to the composer; this was balanced by the need to project their own
individuality as well, and audience expectations that they would do so. The
fact that the vast majority of Romantic pianists were active composers them-
selves encouraged this attitude. In conservatoires nowadays musicians tend
to be split into performance or composition streams (though it is still true
to say that few performers have never composed, and vice versa) but during
the nineteenth century almost all the major pianists – Liszt, Chopin, Alkan,
Thalberg, Anton Rubinstein, the list goes on – were known equally as com-
posers. Some were better composers than others, it is true, but all regarded
themselves as more than interpretative artists, and their compositional role
often spilled over into their performances of other composers’ music. This
approach continued well into the twentieth century. Audiences expected, for
example, Busoni’s Bach playing to be different from d’Albert’s Bach playing,

and sometimes a piece could become more popular in a performer’s version
than in the original. Judging by extant concert programmes and reviews,
around the turn of the century, Henselt’s ‘interpretation’ of Weber’s Rondo
in E was at least as frequently performed as the original. Anton Rubinstein
summed up a general attitude when he advised his piano students to begin
by learning a piece exactly as the composer wrote it. If subsequently some
things still seemed capable of improvement, then the pianist should not
hesitate to alter them. Rubinstein’s approach was actually far stricter than
that of some of his contemporaries, who omitted the first stage entirely. In
contrast, the modern attitude is often to deplore any attempts at the second
stage – if you can’t make it convincing as the composer wrote it, then don’t
play it at all.
During his principal years as a performer Liszt took his fair share of
licence. He later said that it was chiefly his performances of Weber’s Konz-
ertstück that gave him a reputation as a pianist who indulged in extreme
interpretative liberties, but this is hardly borne out by the evidence. In the
early 1830s Ferdinand Hiller commented, ‘Liszt played most new things best
the first time, because they then gave him enough to do. The second time he
always had to add something, if the piece were sufficiently to interest him.’4
By 1837 Liszt himself had admitted the problem was more than a matter of
an isolated sin against Weber. Like a penitent he confessed:
During that time [1829–37], both at public concerts and in private salons
(where people never failed to observe that I had selected my pieces very
badly), I often performed the works of Beethoven, Weber and Hummel, and
let me confess to my shame that in order to wring bravos from the public
that is always slow, in its awesome simplicity, to comprehend beautiful
things, I had no qualms about changing the tempos of the pieces or the
composers’ intentions. In my arrogance I even went so far as to add a host
of rapid runs and cadenzas, which, by securing ignorant applause for me,
sent me off in the wrong direction – one that I fortunately knew enough to
abandon quickly. You cannot believe, dear friend, how much I deplore those
concessions to bad taste, those sacrilegious violations of the SPIRIT and the
LETTER, because the most profound respect for the masterpieces of great
composers has, for me, replaced the need that a young man barely out of
childhood once felt for novelty and individuality. Now I no longer divorce a
composition from the era in which it was written, and any claim to
embellish or modernise the works of earlier periods seems just as absurd for
a musician to make as it would be for an architect, for example, to place a
Corinthian capital on the columns of an Egyptian temple.5
Written around the time of his ground-breaking performance of Beethoven’s

Hammerklavier Sonata, which according to Berlioz was a model of textual
fidelity, Liszt’s contrition was no doubt sincere for the moment. Within a
few years, however, he had several relapses of epic proportions. Reviews of
his concert-tours of the 1840s talk of ‘deliciously fanciful amplifications’6 in
Schubert or unexpected tempo changes in transcriptions of Beethoven Sym-
phonies. In a glowing but (unintentionally?) amusing review of an 1840 per-
formance, the London Times enthused, ‘Handel’s Fugue in E minor . . . was
played by Liszt with an avoidance of everything approaching to meretri-
cious ornament, and indeed scarcely any additions, except a multitude of
ingeniously contrived and appropriate harmonies, casting a glow of colour
over the beauties of the composition, and infusing into it a spirit which
from no other hand it ever before received.’7 The necessity of pleasing the
crowds and earning a living indubitably accounted for much of this, and the
interpretative customs of the era permitted a large degree of freedom any-
way. For Liszt’s interpretative licence to be specially remarked upon, some
of it must have been pretty extreme. An account of a later performance of
the Hammerklavier Sonata,8 and von Bülow’s edition, which gives an octave
re-writing of a passage on the last page as Liszt’s idea, show that by the
1850s Liszt was still making minor alterations even to Beethoven – albeit so
minor that by the standards of the time they must have seemed like nothing
at all.
Most of the detailed accounts of Liszt’s piano teaching come from his
masterclasses in the 1870s and 80s, by which time his approach had undoubt-
edly become more severe. Though he habitually played virtuoso works, and
smaller character pieces, with a large degree of freedom, the major mas-
terpieces were usually interpreted with a sincere fidelity that contrasted
explicitly with the playing of his earlier years. Two composers in particu-
lar, Beethoven and Chopin, had become sacrosanct. He could react with an
anger verging on fury at attempts to ‘improve’ either composer. A student at
an 1882 masterclass drove him into a rage by playing the three penultimate
chords of Chopin’s Ballade No. 3 in A staccato, on the grounds that it made
‘the ending more brilliant’. Pacing the floor angrily, Liszt replied, ‘Chopin
knew how he wanted that piece to end, and I do not propose to argue with
anyone about such matters!’9 As far as his own music was concerned, Liszt
encouraged the more talented pupils – such as Sophie Menter or Alexander
Siloti – to put their own ideas into his virtuoso pieces like the operatic
fantasias or Hungarian Rhapsodies. For Menter he even composed a vastly
altered version of the Tarantelle de Bravura from La Muette de Portici and
charming additions to the sixth Soirée de Vienne (most, but not all, of
which were later incorporated in a new edition produced in the 1880s). He
gave performance instructions in masterclasses for programmatic pieces like
St Francis Walking on the Waves that were considerably more detailed than
the published score.10 At times Liszt improvised new endings, which were
played by some of his students but remained unpublished during his lifetime
(see the ‘coda for Sgambaty’ for Au bord d’une source). What must be empha-
sised, however, is that any licence to alter the score was at its most extensive
in virtuoso pieces, and at its very least in the large-scale ‘serious’ works such
as the Variations on ‘Weinen, klagen’ or the Sonata.
Liszt’s pianos
For diplomatic and practical reasons, Liszt often used pianos provided by
local manufacturers during his concert tours across Europe,11 but there can
be little doubt that his favoured instrument from his early to middle years
was an Erard grand. Liszt had a long association, and personal friendship,
with the Erard family. In the Altenburg in Weimar his Erard piano took
centre stage in the first-floor reception room, which also doubled as a music
library. The Erard nestled together with the Broadwood grand that had once
been Beethoven’s – a visual symbol of Liszt’s musical inheritance (in case
visitors didn’t pick up the hint, Beethoven’s death mask was also on display).
Upstairs, in the ‘official’ music-room, two Viennese grands (a Streicher
and a Bösendorfer) shared space with Mozart’s spinet. By July 1854 the
spinet, and indeed all other instruments, had been dwarfed by a gargantuan
contraption called a piano-organ, made specially for Liszt by Alexandre et
Fils of Paris. This was a relative of the pedal-piano (of the type favoured by
Alkan) mutated as if by some unfortunate dose of radiation to enormous
size and complexity. Its three keyboards and pedalboard operated pipes in
imitation of wind instruments. Liszt had intended the piano-organ as an
aid in working out orchestration, but it also played an active part in his
domestic musical performances. Those interested in musical curiosities can
now see it in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
The piano-organ was the most grotesque outcome of Liszt’s continuing
interest in the development of keyboard instruments. In the late 1840s he
had gone so far as to produce a version of his arrangement of ‘Salve Maria’
from Verdi’s I Lombardi for ‘Armonipiano’. By peculiar coincidence, the
arrangement was published by his friend Ricordi, who also owned the patent
for the ‘Armonipiano’. Liszt added the note ‘A new invention which the house
of Ricordi and Finzi have just adapted to their pianos will have a happy
effect here. It is an invention by which one can obtain, without moving the
fingers, a tremolo like Aeolian harps . . . Such a poetic sonority is impossible
to achieve on pianos unequipped with the tremolo pedal, and I recommend
the restrained employment of it to pianists.’ Other musicians found the
sonority less ‘poetic’, and the ‘Armonipiano’ was buried in the graveyard of
forgotten novelties. Liszt apparently never owned one himself.
Many of the pianos Liszt played during his early concert tours were
too flimsy to withstand his vigorous performance style. He later told his
students: ‘In those times pianos were built too light . . . I usually had two
grands placed on the platform, so that if one gave out it could be replaced
without delaying the recital. Once – I think it was in Vienna, I crippled both
grands, and two others had to be brought in during the intermission.’12 Liszt
had written publicly as far back as the 1830s of the need for an improve-
ment in the tonal capabilities of the piano, although he felt confident that
this would soon be forthcoming. It is nevertheless a striking fact that all of
Liszt’s most pianistically sophisticated inspirations, and many of the other
masterpieces of Romantic piano music such as Chopin’s Ballades and Schu-
mann’s Fantasy, were written before the technological changes established
by Steinway that effectively initiated the truly modern piano. The years
between 1811, when Liszt was born, and 1867, when Steinway scored an
overwhelming success in the Paris International Exhibition with their iron-
framed, over-strung grand, saw momentous changes in piano manufacture.
Liszt, of course, was more aware than most of these developments. He could
hardly fail to be, as many piano makers of the day insisted on sending him
instruments as gifts in the hope of a valuable endorsement. In 1878 he even
represented Hungary on the jury of the Paris International Exhibition of
that year, though as Hanslick reported ‘So far as the piano manufacturers
were concerned, Liszt found himself in the delicate position of a monarch.
And as one of the most benevolent of monarchs he avoided saying anything
that might have brought consequences. So he walked along with us and,
without trying any of the instruments himself, bestowed an encouraging
word here, a friendly smile there.’13 Hanslick’s measure of the weight of
Liszt’s recommendation was accurate enough. More than a century later,
Steinway was still using a Liszt letter from the 1880s praising its pianos and
discussing the use of the new sostenuto pedal in its promotional literature.
The type of Steinway that Liszt admired towards the end of his life – such as
that in Wagner’s Wahnfried in Bayreuth, which he played frequently – was
not substantially different from the modern variety (although the supple
and warm tone quality of surviving examples have more in common with
present-day Hamburg, rather than New York, instruments) and the same is
true for the Bechsteins and Bösendorfers that he was familiar with.
During his Weimar years, if we leave aside the monstrous piano-organ
mentioned earlier and Beethoven’s Broadwood, Liszt’s three grand pianos
represented a contrasted selection of the concert instruments of the day: the
Erard with its double-escapement action and penetrating tone, and the two
Viennese instruments with their simpler Prellmechanik action and more
intimate sound. Unlike the modern piano, none of these instruments was
over-strung, making them capable of less volume but giving them greater
purity of tone. The harshly metallic sound of some of today’s pianos –

especially in the upper registers – was not such a prominent feature, lending
a more delicate flavour to the high treble. This more restrained sound quality
(even on the Erard) had also to do with the design and composition of
the hammers – much smaller than on a modern instrument – and of the
piano frame itself. Of Liszt’s pianos, only the Erard could have produced a
sound anything like the thunderous bass notes today’s grand is capable of.
Though Liszt may have welcomed increased sonority in this register, he is
hardly likely to have applauded the modern overbearing treble, for pupils
reported that he often played high filigree passage-work una corda even
on his own instruments. Moritz Rosenthal, his only pupil at Tivoli in the
Autumn of 1878, recalled ‘the marvellous delicacy and finish of his touch.
The embellishments were like a cobweb – so fine – of costliest lace.’14
One other feature of Liszt’s pianos up until the 1860s that might surprise
contemporary performers was the weaker effect of the string dampers. The
less clean damping produced inevitably a less clean sound and required a
slightly different pedal technique. To some extent the piano itself produced
its own syncopated pedalling, a technique to facilitate legato playing first
described in detail by Köhler in the 1870s in his Technische Künstler-Studien.
Finally, despite the major differences between Erard’s double-escape-
ment action and the Viennese action of the 1850s, both demanded a lighter
touch and a shallower fall of key than the average modern concert-grand,
making virtuoso playing far less arduous. Liszt found the gradual increase
in action-weight as pianos became larger and more sonorous something
of a problem. Even by the late 1840s he was complaining to Erard about
the over-heavy touch of some of his instruments,15 and many pianists have
subsequently had similar difficulties. When touring America, Paderewski
demanded modifications to lighten the action of his piano, and Rosenthal,
famous for the brilliance and speed of his fingerwork, claimed that it was
impossible to achieve the effects he intended on the heavier of the new
instruments.
Liszt’s teaching
Our main sources of information on Liszt’s later teaching are the 1902
Liszt-Pädagogium,16 a collection of notes assembled by Lina Ramann con-
taining Liszt’s instructions for his own works, itself based on contempo-
rary notes taken by pianists present at Liszt’s masterclasses; and the diaries
of his students August Göllerich and Karl Lachmund, which also con-
tain Liszt’s comments on other composers’ music. To these can be added
the memoirs of other pupils such as Mason, Friedheim, Siloti, Rosenthal,
Lamond, Sauer and d’Albert, and second-hand information from books
like Tilly Fleischmann’s Aspects of the Liszt Tradition17 (Fleischmann stud-

ied with Liszt’s student Stavenhagen). Some valuable information has also
been passed down orally from Liszt’s pupils, but obviously all this material,
whether written or not, must be evaluated with regard to context, chronol-
ogy and the reliability of the sources. Finally, the recordings of Liszt’s pupils
at least allow us some idea of how Liszt expected his music to sound. Although
all Liszt’s students had their own individuality, it is impossible to believe
that, taken together, they cannot show the stylistic parameters within which
his music should be played, and they certainly give us a good idea of how
he actually heard it played towards the end of his life.
Unfortunately the Liszt-Pädagogium appears to have been largely ignored
by modern performers, although brief excerpts have appeared in the New
Liszt Edition and the whole volume was reprinted in 1986. The Pädagogium
covers pieces of varying degrees of importance in varying degrees of depth,
but the relation of these two aspects is not what we might think it ought to
be, and the criterion for a work’s inclusion is random indeed: namely that
at some point a pupil brought a certain piece to a masterclass, and Ramann
either chanced to be present or happened later to have access to the notes
of those who were. (Of these students, her most important sources were
August Stradal, Berthold Kellermann, August Göllerich, Heinrich Porges,
Ida Volckmann and Auguste Rennebaum.) Although some works now in
the standard repertoire, like the Sonata, Funérailles, the D Concert Study
commonly known as Un Sospiro and the Bénédiction de Dieu dans la Soli-
tude are treated in some detail, a far greater number of important pieces are
conspicuous by their absence, and we might be forgiven for wishing that
we had Liszt’s recommendations for the performance of, for example, the
Dante Sonata or the 1st Mephisto Waltz rather than an extended disquisi-
tion on the nuances required for Slavimo, Slava Slaveni! and some other
not-too-interesting chips from the floor of the master’s studio. As well as
performance notes, the Pädagogium also contains additions and revisions
to certain pieces, for example a slightly extended ending to Ricordanza and
major alterations to Réminiscences de ‘Robert le Diable’, intended to form
the basis of a new edition of the piece (a plan thwarted by Liszt’s death).
Although the immense interest of the information contained in the
Pädagogium is obvious, it is sometimes unclear what the exact nature was of
the sources that Ramann relied upon. We do not know for certain whether
her notes, or those of the contributing students, were written up dur-
ing the masterclasses, soon afterwards, or are simply ‘reminiscences of a
masterclass’ recalled – accurately or not – at a much later date. Fortunately,
we do not have to rely on the Pädagogium alone for information on Liszt’s
teaching, but can make cross-references to other writings, such as the diaries
and memoirs mentioned above. Several of Liszt’s students, too, were later
involved in editing his works (most prominently Emil von Sauer, José Vianna
da Motta, Eugène d’Albert and Rafael Joseffy) and from Liszt’s own lifetime
(1878) we even have a remarkable edition by his fellow virtuoso Adolf
Henselt of Réminiscences de Lucia di Lammermoor which, though pub-
lished as Henselt’s own ‘interpretation’, supposedly reflects the considerable
liberties – and they are great indeed, especially in the introduction – the
composer allowed himself in the performance of this piece. Liszt was given
the opportunity to examine the proofs of this publication, but declined to
make any alterations because ‘all the variants are admirably suitable’.18 In
1886 he recommended the edition to his students, saying, ‘I have always
played these pieces [the opera fantasies] completely freely, not as printed.
Henselt heard me play it [Réminiscences de Lucia di Lammermoor] once and
included much of what he learned in his edition.’19 See Example 8.1.
The editions by Liszt’s pupils are of mixed value. It is obvious, especially
with the more extensive of these publications − for example Sauer’s for
Peters, or da Motta’s for the Franz Liszt-Stiftung − that the editors could
hardly have received personal guidance from Liszt on every piece in the
publication, and we must be careful lest we imbue their work with too
much authority on account of their status as famous Liszt students, despite
their own considerable talents and their conscientiousness as editors. Sauer’s
edition of the Sonata in B Minor contains one reinforcement of the bass and
one extra pedal instruction (marked ‘according to Liszt’s intentions’) that
we also find in the Pädagogium. In d’Albert’s edition, on the other hand,
not only is there none of this material, but we read that the opening octaves
are to be played ‘wie Pizzicato’, an interpretation that has been very popular
in the twentieth century (see the two recordings by Vladimir Horowitz). It
is no surprise to find that d’Albert neither studied the Sonata with Liszt,
nor appears to have been present at a performance by a pupil who did, for
his advice is directly contradicted by the Pädagogium (using notes taken
by August Stradal after a lesson on the piece) where a sound like ‘muffled
timpani’ is recommended. Liszt even gave technical instructions as to how
this was to be achieved – namely by striking the keys towards the back
in order to lessen the force of the attack. Liszt admired d’Albert’s playing
tremendously, and all his annotations make cogent musical sense. They do
not, however, necessarily derive from Liszt’s own practice.
Finally, we should beware of some entrenched exaggerations concern-
ing Liszt’s teaching: namely that after his middle years he never gave private
lessons, and that he was not interested at all in technical matters, but concen-
trated idealistically only on ‘the music’ while leaving students to work out for
themselves how exactly it should be produced (‘Aus dem Geist schaffe sich die
Technik, nicht aus der Mechanik’ [‘Let technique create itself from the spirit,
not from the fingers’] quotes Ramann in bold print in the Pädagogium).
Specific technical advice is indeed thin on the ground, but it does exist, as
will be discussed a little later. As for the question of private instruction, it is
certainly true that in the final two decades of his life Liszt’s most frequent
teaching forum was the masterclass, but even then certain exceptionally
talented pupils – for example Siloti and Friedheim – were allowed to stay
after class for extra instruction, and in earlier years many pianists – Mason,
Tausig, Stradal, Bache, Rosenthal and more – were fortunate enough to
receive individual lessons.
The Pädagogium and associated writings show that Liszt’s principal con-
cern was always with musical characterisation and communication. His per-
formance directions have to be interpreted in the context of the piece and
its intended musical effect. To a musician unfamiliar with Liszt’s style, for
example, the direction Andante con moto for ‘Invocation’ from Harmonies
poétiques et religieuses might seem to indicate a fairly placid albeit flowing
Example 8.1 Réminiscences de Lucia di Lammermoor (Henselt Edition), bars 1–16

Example 8.1 (Continued)
tempo. The instruction in the Göllerich diaries is ‘fast and fiery’,20 counter-
intuitive in terms of the tempo indication, but entirely suited to the spirit
of the work. The following is a necessarily crude summary of some points
that featured frequently in Liszt’s teaching. Written information like this is
often only fully understood by musicians who already play in this manner
anyway. I give it nevertheless – most of it is simply good musicianship.
1. The music must flow in large periodic phrases. In lyrical works such as Bénédiction
de Dieu this does not imply particularly fast speeds, or alla-breve tempi, but rather
manipulation of tone and articulation to produce a breathing, singing melody.
Liszt in his later years particularly disliked the habit of routinely cutting short
the last note of a phrase, although in 1853, according to William Mason, ‘he was
very fond of strong accents to mark off periods or phrases, and he talked so much
about strong accentuation that one might have supposed he would have abused
it, but he never did’.21
2. The musical sense must continue through the frequent rhetorical pauses in Liszt’s
music. ‘Don’t mince it up.’
3. Expression should always avoid the sentimental. Liszt was emphatic about this, and
often parodied what he regarded as excessively affected playing, even if it was by
Anton Rubinstein, whose energy and drive he otherwise greatly admired (after
a particularly over-cautious performance he advised a student: ‘Das müssen Sie
mehr Rubinsteinisieren’ [piay it more like Rubinstein]).22 The common idea of
Liszt as a performer prone to lapses of precious sentimentality is far from the
truth for the aged Liszt at least. This should extend to posture – no swaying
around or nodding of the head (‘The divine Clara [Schumann] has this soulful
head-wagging on her conscience’23 ) – sit upright, and don’t look at the keys,
rather straight ahead.
4. Piano tone is usually to be imagined in orchestral terms (‘Clarinet’ for the A
major melody in Funérailles) and with a view to the acoustics of the performance
venue. (‘That is too thin, and would not begin to fill a hall. You must remember,
people who have paid their three Marks admission expect you to give them
three Marks’ worth of tone.’24 ) According to Friedheim, even in his advanced
years, when some other aspects of his technique had deteriorated, Liszt was still
unrivalled in building up an orchestral-style climax on the keyboard.
5. Figuration in melodic sections of Liszt’s music should usually be lyrical, not
brilliant. Liszt had a fondness for adding mordents and other embellishments,
most often of an Italianate or Hungarian character, to emphasise parts of the
melodic line.
6. A certain flexibility of tempo is required; metronomic playing will not suffice.
7. Liszt’s rubato was, according to Lachmund: ‘quite different from the Chopin
hastening and tarrying rubato . . . more like a momentary halting of the time, by
a slight pause here or there on some significant note, and when done rightly brings
out the phrasing in a way that is declamatory and remarkably convincing . . . Liszt
seemed unmindful of time, yet the aesthetic symmetry of rhythm did not seem
disturbed.’25
8. The wrong notes of a d’Albert or a Rubinstein do not matter, their inaccu-
racies insignificant compared with their musical expressiveness. ‘Thut nichts
[It doesn’t matter]. Rubinstein himself does not object to a few ‘“uninvited
guests”.’26 Splashy, insensitive playing, however, brought Liszt’s wrath upon
the perpetrator. In a moving 1941 BBC radio broadcast, Frederick Lamond
talked about Liszt’s surprising strictness and concern for musical cleanliness.
Lamond’s awe of Liszt’s censure is still apparent in his voice after nearly sixty
years.
The letter of the score

As to what the later pupils learned from their lessons and classes with Liszt,
we have an invaluable – and for once, aural – source in recordings and piano
rolls, including performances by Rosenthal, von Sauer, Lamond, d’Albert,
Friedheim, Siloti and others. While it is certainly true that the individuality
of most of these artists renders it unlikely that we can hear in their perfor-
mances a slavish rendering of their master’s wishes (and anyway, pianists like
Rosenthal were also taught by other major figures of the day and undoubt-
edly reflected this in their playing), with a performer like Arthur Friedheim
we may get closer to Liszt than with some others. Liszt famously remarked
that Friedheim’s performance of the B minor Sonata was ‘the way I imagined
it when I was writing it’, and although Friedheim was deeply unhappy with
both his acoustic recordings and piano rolls, his idolatry of his teacher was
such that we might well expect to find specific aspects of Liszt’s performance
style copied in his own playing. In fact we do indeed come across features
that seem to echo comments in the Pädagogium and other memoirs.
In Friedheim’s piano roll of Harmonies du Soir, for example, he inserts
(at the lead-in to the E major section) a turn similar to that suggested by the
Pädagogium for inclusion before the recapitulation of Un sospiro. In another
piano roll we hear a performance of the second Legend, St Francis Walking on
the Waves, that corresponds closely to Liszt’s advice preserved in Göllerich’s
diaries, with a loud and stately opening more varied than the dynamic and
tempo indications in the score suggest, and the extension and repetition
of the ‘waves’ figuration into upper and lower octaves. (Suggestions for
extensions like these are found throughout the Pädagogium, especially in the
section on Réminiscences de ‘Robert le Diable’, where long sections of passage-
work are treated in the same fashion.) Friedheim also plays an alternative
ending similar to one given in the critical notes to da Motta’s Liszt-Stiftung
edition. This does not appear in the New Liszt Edition, though it seems
more imaginative than the published version. A copy of St Francis Walking
on the Waves on display in the house in Bayreuth (now a museum) where
Liszt died contains this ending written into a printed copy of the score in
Liszt’s own hand. It should be pointed out that extensions of figuration were
sometimes, but by no means always, prompted by extensions of the piano’s
range. This Legend could easily have been played on a piano of the 1860s as
Friedheim recorded it decades later, and Liszt suggested similar additions
to his pupils in many other pieces, such as his two Polonaises.27
Why Liszt had not simply written more extensive passagework in the
original score in the first place is an interesting question. Some changes he
suggested to students were probably genuine afterthoughts, and some in
response to a belated realisation of just how difficult his virtuoso music was.
Of La Campanella he remarked mischievously: ‘The difficult octave accom-

paniment in the left hand on the last page may be simplified . . . When I
wrote that I did not teach as much as I do now.’28 Some alterations were
also no doubt of the sort that any accomplished virtuoso might have been
expected to consider making, and were not confined to Liszt’s own music.
Even for Chopin’s music, which he was often so particular about, he advised
the occasional alteration (for example repeating the introduction to the A
major section of the F Polonaise).29 When telling a pupil to alternate the
direction of the spread of certain chords in his transcription of Saint-Saëns’s
Danse Macabre, he added as an aside, ‘I did not write it so – it takes too
much time.’30 He also suggested improvements in several other pieces, for
example a repetition of the introduction before playing the second stanza
of his transcription of Gretchen am Spinnrade,31 the repeat of the mid-
dle part of Au Lac de Wallenstadt ‘to enhance its effect’,32 and for bars
276–8 and 284–6 of Scherzo and March he recommended increasing the
demonic clangour by crossing the right hand over the left to ‘hit a few low
A’s’.33
All this is, of course, in addition to the improvised prelude that any
competent pianist could be expected to play before the beginning of many
pieces, and to the occasional liberties that could be taken with endings. When
a student failed to prelude before a performance of the third Liebestraum,
Liszt pointed out the omission and made a short one up himself (consisting
of only three chords).34 At the close of his Ave Maria (written for Lebert and
Stark’s Grosse Klavierschule) he instructed, ‘At the end, so that the people
know that it is over, play the Lohengrin Chord [i.e. a chord of A major in the
treble as at the opening of the Prelude to Act 1 of Wagner’s opera].’35 He was
especially aware that the radical endings of many of his late pieces would
generate incomprehension in public performance. Regarding the first Valse
oubliée, which in the score famously closes impishly on a single note, he
advised in 1885, ‘People are not satisfied when they do not hear a chord at
the end, so you can by all means add a pair of chords.’36
Most modern ‘classical’ performers are, of course, unaccustomed to pre-
luding or making even minor changes to the end of a piece of music, and
some other aspects of Liszt’s interpretative legacy also go somewhat against
modern performance-practice. For example, the Pädagogium insists that the
main theme of Funérailles be ‘not rhythmical!’, and that a dragging, mourn-
ful articulation is needed here, in contrast to the usual clipped and precise
interpretation that we hear in several present-day recordings. According
to Lachmund, Liszt expected the performance of rhythmic figures to vary
depending on the mood of the music: ‘In quiet music the sixteenth-note
should be played a little slower, and in lively time a bit later and faster than the
exact value.’37 The more general comments on Funérailles are also relevant
to other pieces. The opening LH ostinato is to be doubled in length, with the
RH entering in a ‘when ready’ fashion (similar instructions are given for Un
Sospiro, and no doubt apply to many other pieces which begin with a few bars
of repeated accompaniment figuration). A more difficult recommendation
to follow is the injunction that the bass of the later D ostinato section is
to be played with clarity in every note. This is an especially frequent type
of admonition in Liszt’s pupils’ memoirs (see, for example, comments on a
performance of Tausig’s Ungarische Zigeunerweisen38 ), and recalls admiring
critiques of the clarity of Liszt’s own playing (by Schumann, Hanslick and
many others). Exactly how this clarity is to be achieved while also observing
the long pedal markings is a problem raised by Brendel in the preface to
the Pädagogium reprint, and certainly a consistent solution is not possible
here – even on Liszt’s instruments, either the pedal markings are altered, or
clarity is replaced by an indistinct rumble in the bass.
Pedalling
Indeed, exact adherence to Liszt’s pedal markings is sometimes not advisable
or even possible, especially on today’s pianos (with the exception of the
Tannhäuser overture transcription, which, simply enough, leaves the use of
the pedal to the discretion of the performer). It appears that Liszt used the
una corda much more than is indicated in his scores (as is true for many
other composers – see Czerny on Beethoven), and that in particular soft
filigree passagework was usually played with the una corda depressed. For
the Sonata, a dash of una corda for just a few bars is recommended in the
Pädagogium for the second group to give a distant, mystical tone-colour to
an unexpected harmonisation. Liszt, however, did, advise against using the
una corda to vary the sonority when playing forcefully (a common practice
with Leschetitsky and his students, and many later pianists), because he
believed it tended to throw the instrument out of tune (this was possibly a
legacy from his upbringing on earlier nineteenth-century instruments).
Liszt’s approach to pedal indications in his scores was inconsistent. In
the G minor study of the Grandes Etudes (later titled Vision), he marks no
pedal until nearly halfway through the piece, despite the fact that the first
page is to be played with the left hand alone – quite impossible without
constant pedal. When the pedal is actually indicated, at the climactic turn
to G major, it seems to be there merely to underscore the increased volume
required. A bar after that, specific pedal markings disappear. This is a piece
deliberately written in Thalberg’s legato arpeggio style, and some pedal
is required virtually throughout. Of course, there were differences in the

pedal and damping mechanism of Liszt’s pianos in the 1830s compared
to those of today (discussed above), but none of these would affect our
general conclusions here. The paucity of indications in this study is all
the more puzzling because other pieces in the set, such as the C minor,
have a detailed range of pedal markings. Indeed, pedal is indicated in the
C minor study even where we would not expect it. At Animato il tempo,
the bar-by-bar pedal seems to contradict the instruction Sempre staccato e
distintamente il bassi, which would be more easily achieved with no pedal
at all.
The implication is that Liszt, during the period of the Grandes Etudes
at least, tended to indicate the use of the sustaining pedal only when the
pedalling was not immediately obvious, or in order to underline a dramatic
increase in volume. This would explain, for example, why the F minor study
has no pedal marked at all, despite containing long passages of passionate
legato melody over extended bass figuration. In the G minor study, the
pedal markings at the climax might actually have been designed to prevent
over-pedalling, by requesting a change at each new harmony, rather than
to suddenly initiate the use of the pedal halfway through the piece. Liszt’s
attitude appears to have been a Brahmsian ‘any ass can see you need pedal
here’.
Even during the Weimar period Liszt’s approach was inconsistent. All
the pieces in Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, published in 1853, contain
extensive and detailed pedallings – except one. The Andante lagrimoso has
pedal marked for only four bars – again, the climax of the piece – though all
pianists would use pedal throughout this work at least as frequently as in the
others of the set. Significantly, the marked pedal here extends the bass note
much further than its written value to provide a warm cushion of sound for
the melody above. Liszt must have feared that otherwise this type of passage
might be played in a cold and dry manner. Similar inconsistency can be seen
in the six Consolations (1850). The famous no. 3, in D, is heavily pedalled
but the others not at all, though no. 6 requires nearly as much pedal, and
the rest certainly some.
Of the larger Weimar piano pieces, the First Ballade has no pedalling,
as might be expected in a piece published the same year as the Tannhäuser
Overture. The Concert Solo (published 1851) has frequent pedalling, perhaps
partly resulting from its genesis as a conservatoire competition piece. The
Second Ballade (published 1854) begins as if the pedal markings are going to
be as extensive as the Concert Solo, but they disappear after three pages. The
opposite applies to the Scherzo and March (1854), where pedalling suddenly
puts in an appearance on the very last page of a twenty-four page piece.
The Sonata, not that unusually for a work published in 1854, also contains
miserly pedal indications. From the late 1850s onwards Liszt, chastened by
the experience of listening to ineptly pedalled performances of his music,
took more care to indicate the basic requirements for each piece.
Liszt’s markings for the una corda pedal are equally variable. Though
he often indicated its use, he was chary in writing tre corde cancellation
instructions, perhaps assuming that any decent pianist would use his judge-
ment as to the right moment. In the Sonata, for example, the Una corda
and Sempre una corda indications in the Andante sostenuto are Liszt’s own,
but the Tre corde cancellation that we find in the New Liszt Edition at
bar 363 is an editorial addition. Unquestionably the una corda will have
to be abandoned somewhere around here, for the intense central section
(a triple-forte climax) can hardly be given an adequate rendering with
the una corda depressed. Perhaps after the climax the una corda should
be retaken, certainly for the triple-piano passage a few bars later.
The so-called ‘sostenuto’ pedal – at least in its present form – came on
the scene too late in Liszt’s life for it to have been available to him for the
vast majority of his works, but there exists a letter to Steinway praising the
invention and suggesting its use in the D Consolation and the transcription
of Berlioz’s ‘Dance of the Sylphs’ from The Damnation of Faust. There are
a few other pieces where it can be used to good effect (the A bass pedal
in the introduction to the first movement of the Symphonie Fantastique
transcription, for example).
Liszt was well aware that use of the pedals will vary in each separate
performance according to the acoustics of the hall and the characteristics of
the piano. It was probably this consideration that prompted him sometimes
to abandon pedal markings in the first place. Accounts of his later playing and
teaching show that his pedalling was subtle, sophisticated and occasionally at
variance with his own published indications, although we would be unwise
to reject the printed markings out of hand without first considering the
effect intended. The long pedal markings in the exposition of the Dante
Sonata, for example, produce a confused and dissonant sonority, and seem
to be designed to do just that. The pianos Liszt played on in the last two
decades of his life, however, would have required a different handling of the
pedal from those he was familiar with before, and the printed markings are
therefore best evaluated in relation to their date. The Pädagogium contains
many references to Liszt’s use of various types of half-pedal, described as ‘a
momentary half-damping of the strings’,39 and tremolo pedal effects, none
of which appears in his scores. We should not be surprised at this. As is true
for most fine players, Liszt’s pedalling was too sophisticated in practice to
be accommodated within the standard musical notation of the time.
Tempi
Liszt claimed he was not in favour of extreme tempi – except for
Mendelssohn.40 The Pädagogium gives several specific metronome marks
for his works. Although typographical errors are frequent, we should be
grateful that the marks are there at all. There are few things more frustrating
than advice such as that in the Göllerich diaries (for Harmonies du Soir) –
‘not too slow’ – when we have no idea how slowly that is. As for the numerous
misprinted Pädagogium markings, they are luckily so extreme as to make it
obvious that something is wrong. The marking crotchet = 96 for the central
andante of the Sonata seems preposterously rushed until we remember that
one of the Pädagogium’s favourite misprints involves reversing the order
of the numerals, and 69 does indeed feel much more comfortable here. In
faster passages, however, Liszt often appeared to favour tempi that would
be considered on the speedy side by modern standards. Minim = 80 for
the allegro sections of the Sonata is certainly a fairly brisk tempo, and when
a student played the Transcendental Study ‘Eroica’ Liszt let the tempo be
taken ‘much faster’ than Göllerich would have imagined.41
The reminiscences of Charles Halle, among others, suggests that, as a
young man, Liszt’s tempi were sometimes very fast indeed, which con-
tributed to his reputation for technical wizardry. The Pädagogium tempi
for Réminiscences de ‘Robert le Diable’, however, do give us some pause for
thought, for Liszt intended the long octave section in the middle to be
played at a moderate tempo (crotchet = 116, no faster than in the ballet
at this point!), rather than the sprint it has hitherto become. Liszt claimed
that this section constituted ‘the point of rest’ in the fantasy, and criticised
Anton Rubinstein for his excessive speed here. Interestingly, another piece
that has today become a test of rapidity – Feux Follets – was also described
as requiring a ‘sehr bequem’ tempo.42
Other technical aspects

William Mason reported that Liszt felt that he himself was not a good tech-
nical model to follow. Despite his studies with Czerny, Liszt believed that
his early training had been mostly haphazard, and that he reached his goals
mainly ‘by force of will’ – a path that he did not recommend to his students
in the 1850s, because, as he told them honestly, if perhaps too frankly: ‘you
lack my personality’.43 Those students who came to Liszt’s 1880s classes
certainly did not hear him at his technical best, for old age and ill-health
had by that time taken their toll. According to Brahms and Remenyi, the
playing of Liszt in his prime was quite incomparable, and even as late as
his Vienna concerts of the 1870s Hanslick was amazed that he had retained
such a complete technical command. Friedheim recalled that in Liszt’s final

years, although his technique was still impressive, it was not unsurpassed.
Godowsky, he claimed, had finer octaves, and Rosenthal was more adept
in the handling of complex passage-work. He did concede that he had
never since heard anyone build up an orchestral climax on the keyboard
as Liszt did, and it is not surprising that most of the technical advice in the
Pädagogium and elsewhere concerns the manipulation of piano sonorities,
rather than the achievement of accuracy or speed. According to Lamond, the
aged Liszt responded to one pupil’s technical display (in Chopin’s Polonaise,
op. 53) with the scathing ‘Do you think I care how fast you can play octaves?’
Rather unfair, perhaps, as he undoubtedly would have cared fifty years earlier
(witness his reaction to Thalberg’s successes in the mid-1830s), and the three
volumes of exercises composed in the late 1870s show that Liszt had a more
than casual interest in the codification of technical difficulties.
Technical comments in the Pädagogium and other sources include several
remarks on the way one should hold the hand in certain passages (when
playing a melody using both thumbs, the wrists should be held higher than
normal44 ), and advice towards the achieving of certain sonorous effects akin
to tone-clusters in the Grande Solo de Concert and Réminiscences de ‘Robert
le Diable’. In the opening of Robert, and the ‘funeral march’ section of the
Concert Solo, the player is directed to hold on to each note of (and pedal
through) the chromatic runs in the bass, creating a threatening, tenebrous
fog of sound in the lower register of the keyboard that is hardly implied by
the notation, and contrary to the clean modern manner of playing these
passages (when they are played at all). For Un sospiro Liszt made some
recommendations on the dividing of octave passages between the hands,
and similar advice appears in the Göllerich diaries for the opening of the
fantasy on Rigoletto,45 which could no doubt be considered to apply in many
other pieces, like the central climax of Waldesrauschen. As much visual as
aural in nature is the comment in Lachmund’s diaries that when playing the
opening of the B minor Ballade, Liszt lifted his right hand up in the air up to
a foot above the keyboard before striking each note, while at the same time
sitting upright and looking straight ahead, saying, ‘One should not play for
the people who sit in the front row – they are usually ‘dead-heads’, but play
for those up in the gallery that pay ten pfennigs for their tickets; they should
not only hear, but they should see.’46 It must have been quite a sight.
Conclusion
What is the main point that we can take away from an overview of the
Pädagogium and related material? Liszt was obviously very concerned with
what he described in the preface to his Symphonic Poems as a ‘Periodischer

Vortrag’, in other words the maintenance of a long musical ‘line’ in perfor-
mance, by, among other things, carefully regulating the weight of accents
within and between bars. The numerous rhetorical pauses (not to be consid-
ered a sign of ‘creative poverty’ according to Ramann) were not to be allowed
to break up the flow – rather the music was to ‘carry on through the silence’.
The exact speed of a performance was of much less importance than this
fluidity. This is one of the most striking disjunctions with modern practice,
where a heavy, ‘sempre tenuto’ style of playing is of frequent occurrence.
It is illustrative to compare Moriz Rosenthal’s recording of Liszt’s Chopin
song transcription My Joys with some modern performances. Rosenthal’s
limpid and plastic delineation of the melody is evidently inspired by the
desire to ‘sing’ on the piano in the same way as Liszt seems to have taught
his pupils in lessons on the Bénédiction de Dieu and other pieces. The speed
is not particularly fast, but the music moves fluently forward unhindered
by too frequent stresses on single notes, or the desire to impose a weighty
profundity often indistinguishable from boredom.
The same points can be illustrated in the recordings of other Liszt pupils,
in particular Emil von Sauer’s beautifully pellucid performance of Ricor-
danza. Problems with the early recording process, which allowed only a
little more than four minutes of music to be recorded continuously, meant
that few long works were set down in the early decades of the twentieth
century. We do have a profusion of shorter pieces recorded by Liszt students
and a performance of the two concerti by Emil von Sauer, with the orches-
tra conducted by Felix Weingartner, another Liszt student. Friedheim was
famously unhappy with his recordings, and they are unlikely to show him
at his best, yet his rigorously unsentimental, even ‘modern’, performance
of the first movement of the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata contrasts vividly with the
Romantic soulfulness typified by Paderewski, and perhaps reflects some-
thing of Liszt’s later approach to Beethoven.47 Liszt once parodied what he
regarded as Rubinstein’s wayward tempo changes in this Sonata. According
to Siloti, his own interpretation was understated, but unforgettable.
No one listening to these early recordings can fail to note some striking
differences from performances of today, especially in the frequent use of var-
ious types of chordal arpeggiation and non-synchronisation between bass
and treble not indicated in the score. This is also a prominent feature, for
example, of Cortot’s recording of the Liszt Sonata from the 1920s. Although
the Liszt pupils used these techniques less pervasively than Paderewski, who
represents the ne plus ultra in this regard, they were still common in their
playing and were an accepted part of pianism. It is unlikely, to say the
least, that this fondness for asynchronicity, with its consequent subtle web
of rubato and layered-voicings, arose first with this generation of pianists.
Brahms, apparently, spread almost every chord in lyrical passages. Liszt

probably played in a similar, if not identical fashion, to his pupils in this
respect, for the modern taste for uniform chordal attack is a product of the
recording era, and perhaps also a sign of the influence of Busoni, whose
aim in piano performance was often to achieve an organ-like sonority. The
imaginative Romantic attitude to arpeggiation and rubato is as much a part
of Liszt performance style as the appropriate treatment of ornamentation
is in Mozart. It is to be hoped that the transfer of so many historic record-
ings onto CD will promote a re-examination of this and other aspects of
Romantic pianism by the present generation of performers.
9 Liszt’s Lieder
monika hennemann
Liszt’s Lieder have long been, in their original format, among the most
neglected areas of his achievement, yet many attracted critical admiration
from their first appearance, and several of the piano transcriptions derived
from them are among his best-known pieces. After an overview of Liszt’s
more than eighty songs (over 120 if revisions are included), this chapter
will briefly address this paradox, the most extreme example of which is the
setting for voice and piano of Freiligrath’s ‘O lieb, so lang du lieben kannst’,
which is relatively unknown in the original, although the composer’s own
solo arrangement, incarnated for piano as the third of Liebesträume – Drei
Notturnos – is almost tiresomely popular. This general trend in the reception
of Liszt’s songs and song transcriptions established itself during his lifetime
and continued throughout the twentieth century. When Michael Saffle first
came to compile his Garland Guide to Liszt Research in 1991, it was self-
evident to him that ‘no comparable portion of Liszt’s output has received less
attention from scholars than his songs and recitations for solo voice’.1 This
echoed at a distance of more than a hundred years Francis Hueffer’s entry on
Liszt for the first edition of Sir George Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musi-
cians, which appeared before the composer’s death. Writing at a point when
the Liebesträume piano transcriptions and to a slightly lesser extent those
of the three Petrarch Sonnets were already well-known works, Hueffer
deplored the fact that the songs had been ‘not hitherto sufficiently appreci-
ated by Liszt’s critics’. Attempting to correct this somewhat, he offered the
following encomium:
It is here perhaps that his intensity of feeling, embodied in melody pure and
simple, finds its most perfect expression. Such settings as those of Heine’s
‘Du bist wie eine Blume,’ or Redwitz’s ‘Es muss ein Wunderbares sein’ are
conceived in the true spirit of the Volkslied. At other times a greater liberty
in the rhythmical phrasing of the music is warranted by the poem itself, as,
for instance, in Goethe’s night-song ‘Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh,’ the
heavenly calm of which Liszt has rendered by his wonderful harmonies in a
manner which alone would secure him a place amongst the great masters of
German song. Particularly the modulation from G major back into the
original E major at the close of the piece is of surprising beauty . . . Victor
Hugo’s ‘Comment, disaient-ils’ is one of the most graceful songs among
[192] Liszt’s works, and in musical literature generally.2
193 Liszt’s Lieder
Hueffer moderated his enthusiasm, however, with a few words of criticism:

‘Less happy is the dramatic way in which such ballads as Heine’s “Loreley”
and Goethe’s “König in Thule” are treated. Here the melody is sacrificed to
the declamatory element, and that declamation, especially in the last-named
song, is not always faultless.’3
Although complaints about aspects of Liszt’s musical declamation persist
to this day, it is these two more complex Lieder that are now among the most
praised and performed, ironically owing in part to the aspect that Hueffer
disliked – their more extrovert, operatic quality that allows the singer to
dramatise a variety of moods and emotions in the confines of one song.
To those of Liszt’s contemporaries who believed that an essential feature
of the Lied was simplicity (and this was an influential school of thought
from the days of Goethe and Zelter onwards), his more ambitious settings
undermined the very nature of the genre, a stance predictably taken by the
doyen of Viennese critics, Eduard Hanslick, who found words of praise for
only one of Liszt’s songs, ‘Es muss ein Wunderbares sein’, on the grounds
that it was ‘the simplest, and for that reason the best’.4 As he got older, Liszt
himself swayed towards this view. When the young Felix Mottl visited him
in 1879 to show him his own Lieder, Liszt found them over-complex. He
advised:
Songs should have a simple accompaniment and avoid any unnecessary

modulation. Wagner has modulated only when compelled to do so by poetic
or musical necessity. And as far as my own modest songs are concerned,
they have very simple accompaniments; Es muss ein Wunderbares sein, for
example. That, my dear young friend, is something you should mark well!5
There was one other reason, unmentioned but compelling, that this partic-
ular song should have been so appropriately simple: it was written between
dinner and a soirée a few hours later at the request of a Prussian Princess,
and finished by 9 o’clock that evening.6
As opposed to contemporary evaluations including that of the mature
composer, modern critics have found much to admire in Liszt’s protean
response to the poetry in his more ambitious Lieder, and it is obvious
from the works themselves that simplicity was not a primary aim of the
Liszt of the late 1830s and 1840s, whatever he later came to believe. George
Steiner, in a comparison of settings of ‘Es war ein König in Thule’ by Zelter,
Schumann, Berlioz, Gounod and Liszt, considered Liszt’s complex handling
of the text ‘far more acute’ than Schumann’s, and called it ‘a reading based
on the ambiguity of the narrative, on the tensions between sensuality and
death, between fidelity and waste that organize Goethe’s treatment and
which dramatize Margarethe’s unconscious state’.7 He concluded that Liszt’s
setting was the most sensitive of all five to Goethe’s poetic intentions: ‘It takes
194 Monika Hennemann
liberties, it overdramatizes, but it is attentive to the discipline and secrecy

of Goethe’s purpose.’8
Language and text

Differing critical reactions to Liszt’s Lieder are not surprising given their
variety and stylistic range. Despite his prodigious early start as both pianist
and composer, Liszt did not publish any songs until 1843. He appears to
have composed several (lost) works in the genre by 1825, when he was still
in his teens, and the score of the opera Don Sanche (written that same year
in collaboration with his composition teacher Paer) shows that he could
by that time write fluently, if hardly profoundly, for the voice. For most of
the 1830s, although a profusion of masterly Schubert song transcriptions
flowed from his pen, Liszt showed no interest in composing his own Lieder –
although it cannot be denied that he must have been silently absorbing a
great deal from the Romantic godfather of the genre. His first surviving song,
Bocelli’s ‘Angiolin dal biondo crin’, was not written until 1839, prompted
by admiration of the golden locks of his daughter Blandine, who did indeed
seem like a little angel to her proud father. Similar personal reasons also
stimulated the composition, by 1841, of the nostalgic ‘Die Zelle in Nonnen-
werth’ (Liszt spent several summers there with his family) and, soon after,
of ‘Die Loreley’, dedicated to Blandine’s (equally blonde) mother Marie
d’Agoult. No doubt ‘sie kämmt ihr goldnes Haar’ had particular resonance
at the time. Ironically, in 1860, long after his final separation from d’Agoult,
Liszt prepared a revised orchestral version of ‘Loreley’ for the singer Emilie
Genast, by whom he was – much to the chagrin of his then ‘official’ mistress
Princess von Sayn-Wittgenstein – more than just musically enchanted.
Completing the list of these early settings around 1840 are the winsome
‘Il m’aimait tant’ (to a poem of Delphine Gay) and a pianistically effu-
sive version of Heine’s ‘Im Rhein’ (or rather versions, as the piano part
is presented in two very different arrangements – one as an ‘ossia’ under
the other). ‘Mignons Lied’ (Kennst du das Land?) and ‘Der du von dem
Himmel bist’ initiated a steady production of songs from 1842 onwards,
which only came to a firm end at the close of 1860. Liszt’s interest in the
transcription of other composers’ Lieder persisted (in 1840, for example,
he published arrangements of seven songs by Mendelssohn), but gradu-
ally took second place to his original works. By December of 1859 he was
satisfied enough with his output to contemplate publishing a Gesammelte
Lieder, wryly noting that two specimens had been encored in salons not
well disposed towards him – but only because they had been announced
as ‘posthumous songs of Schubert’.9 In the 1860s Liszt turned his attention
mostly to religious music, and it was not until 1871 that he resumed Lieder
composition with Coronini’s ‘Die Fischerstochter’. In the final fifteen years of
his life he gave only sporadic attention to the genre, but just before his death
remembered his 1844 setting of Uhland’s ‘Die Vätergruft’, a poem about an
aged warrior returning to the tomb of his ancestors to die, and arranged
it for voice and orchestra. It was the last composition he completed – an
appropriate farewell.
Liszt was fluent in both German (his native tongue) and French (which
he learned in his teens and soon came to prefer), reading widely through the
Romantic literature of these languages while choosing poetry for his songs.
Ironically, most of the faults of declamation for which he has been criticised
involve settings of German texts (even taking into account the large number
of songs in this language), for example an ungainly emphasis on ‘du’ in
the first two versions (1842 and 1854) of ‘Mignons Lied’ (‘Kennst du das
Land’), corrected in the final revision of 1860. Although by the 1850s Liszt
was living in the German-speaking environment of Weimar, he was still
surprisingly capable of basic errors of accentuation – most notoriously in
his initial attempt at setting the ‘Chorus Mysticus’ for the Faust Symphony:
it was his pupil Hans von Bülow who generously pointed out to him that
‘Das ewig Weibliche’ was not the most natural way to stress Goethe’s famous
line. Although these, and other solecisms, were corrected in revisions, they
do seem to indicate that for much of his life Liszt was indeed more comfort-
able with French, despite his birth in a predominantly German-speaking
part of Hungary to a German-speaking (albeit in a strong Austrian dialect)
mother.
Liszt never learned Hungarian as a child, and a later patriotically inspired
attempt to become more closely acquainted with the language met with
frustration and little success. It therefore hardly features in his song settings,
although he composed ‘Isten veled’ (‘Farewell’) by Horvath around 1846–7,
as well as two national songs, ‘A magyarok Istene’ (‘Hungary’s God’) and
‘Magyar Kiraly-dal’ (‘Hungarian Royal Song’) towards the end of his life.
After his extensive European travels with Marie d’Agoult, Liszt had a basic
grasp of Italian, but he was far from fluent and relied on the help of Princess
Cristina Belgiojoso when close familiarity was required, such as with his
Sardanapale opera project. Of his songs, only ‘Angiolin’, Princess Therèse
von Hohenlohe’s ‘La Perla’ and the Tre Sonetti di Petrarca are settings of
Italian poems. Two curiosities among his Lieder remain, one in Russian and
one in English. Although he gave concerts in the country twice in the 1840s,
Liszt spoke no Russian. His only treatment of a Russian text, Tolstoy’s ‘Ne
brani menya, moy drug’(‘Do not reproach me, my friend’), dates from
the final year of his life, by which time he had been visited in Weimar
once by Cui and several times by Borodin, resulting in a bond of mutual
admiration with the ‘mighty handful’ of Russian composers. Liszt had no

such personal incentive to compose ‘Go not, happy day’, his only song in
English, commissioned for inclusion in an album of Tennyson settings by
various composers. He had little acquaintance with English, and what he did
know of it, he disliked. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he was not over-impressed
with his own attempts to respond to the poem, dismissing the resulting song
as ‘dürftig’ (‘scanty’).
Most of Liszt’s songs were set to German texts. Goethe and Heine feature
most frequently; they also provided poems for some of his most successful
Lieder, such as the meditative ‘Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh’ and the violently
embittered ‘Vergiftet sind meine Lieder’, in addition to others already men-
tioned above. He also set poems by Schiller (Drei Lieder aus ‘Wilhelm Tell’),
the Romantic poets Ludwig Rellstab (‘Nimm einen Strahl der Sonne’, ‘Wo
weilt er’ and ‘Es rauschen die Winde’), Friedrich Rückert (‘Ich liebe dich’),
Nikolaus Lenau (‘Die drei Zigeuner’), Emanuel Geibel (‘Die stille Wasser-
rose’), Hoffmann von Fallersleben (‘Ich scheide’, ‘Wie singt die Lerche schön’,
‘Lasst mich ruhen’ and ‘In Liebeslust’), and Ferdinand Freiligrath (‘O lieb,
so lang du lieben kannst’, ‘Und wir dachten der Toten’), as well as a host
of more minor figures. Prominent among his thirteen French songs are
the settings of Victor Hugo (‘Oh! quand je dors’, ‘Comment, disaient-ils’,
‘Quand tu chantes, bercée’, ‘Enfant, si j’étais roi’, ‘S’il est un charmant gazon’,
‘La tombe et la rose’, and ‘Gastibelza’), followed at a good distance by lyrics
of Alexandre Dumas (‘Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher’) and Alfred de Musset (‘J’ai
perdu ma force et ma vie’).
Musical features
Space does not permit us to discuss individual musical aspects of more than
a few of Liszt’s Lieder here, but some examples should give an idea of the
range of his achievement. Many of his earliest songs are among his most
complex in conception, and the wide-ranging ambition of settings such as
‘Loreley’ or ‘Es war ein König in Thule’ is evident even in their judiciously
pared-down revisions. Liszt at his simplest, however, was a melodist of
disarming charm, as can be seen in the Romance ‘Oh pourquoi donc’ of
1843, one of his rare songs in a strophic format. This slender work had a
rather curious subsequent history. Towards the end of Liszt’s life a publisher
requested permission to make an edition of the virtually forgotten piano
transcription of the Romance that the composer had arranged in 1848.
Liszt refused, and instead wrote an elegiac new piece entitled ‘Romance
oubliée’ (1880) based upon the same material, but reworked in the nostalgic,
even wilful, manner characteristic of his late style. Little was left of the
song’s haunting, but relatively conventional, melody in E minor, originally
repeated unchanged for each of the four stanzas, a procedure facilitated
by the convenient reiteration of ‘Et par le rire de la terre/ N’insultez pas
aux pleurs du ciel’ at the end of every verse. This provoked one of Liszt’s
characteristic chains of third-related harmonies, the second inversion B
major chord at ‘rire’ briefly darkening to G minor for ‘n’insultez pas’, then
brightening to E major at ‘ciel’ before the song ends in a forlorn tonic minor.
The piano accompaniment is of the simplest type, the vocal line apt and
adroitly moulded. Liszt is here at his most unpretentious, but completely
successful within his restricted aims.
At the other end of the scale of ambition is the second version of ‘Lore-
ley’, one of Liszt’s most touching and sophisticated creations. As with ‘Oh
pourquoi donc’, some of the most striking effects come from mediant har-
monies, but here worked out on a structural scale. In fact, the song is an
early example of ‘progressive tonality’, beginning in E minor, stating the
main theme in E major, but recapitulating it and closing in G major. Certain
aspects of the structure – though not the tonality – nevertheless conform to
a modified sonata archetype, with an easily identifiable introduction, main
theme (‘Die Luft ist kühl’), second group (‘Die schönste Jungfrau sitzet’,
extended by a further eight bars in the French version of the song Liszt
made in the 1880s), development section (the shipwreck, ‘Den Schiffer im
kleinen Schiffe’, based on fragmented material from the introduction) and
recapitulation (‘Und das hat mit ihrem Singen’). There is, admittedly, merely
a partial recapitulation of the second group (only the music at ‘sie kämmt ihr
goldnes Haar’, also foreshadowed in the introduction, returns at the end of
the song), which opened radically in B major. The lowered-mediant reca-
pitulation of the first theme (glancing only briefly and subtly at the initial
tonic of E major) and eventual ending in that key is highly unusual, but these
modifications of tonal expectations have an evident narrative function. The
description of the irresistible, unearthly beauty of the Loreley is set in a key
as distant from the opening tonic as possible, and the recapitulation of the
main melody a minor third higher in G major is an intensification as much
as a repeat, appropriately drawing the music slightly nearer the bewitch-
ing Loreley’s own tonal area. After the shipwreck and the sailor’s death the
emotional landscape has been transformed (‘Und das hat mit ihrem Singen
die Loreley getan’), a change reflected in the tonality. At the close of the
fairy-tale there is an almost child-like atmosphere of wonder, rather than
tragedy, mirrored in the transfigured harmonies that accompany the singer
(magically scored in the orchestral version), which like the introduction
seem to have had their effect on the composer of Tristan und Isolde.
The keyboard part of ‘Loreley’ is virtuosic in its variety of colours and

textures, but not particularly taxing in comparison with some of Liszt’s more
extreme challenges in the genre (for example the first version of ‘Enfant, si
j’étais roi’). The vivid illustration of the shipwreck is typical of his use of the
piano for dramatic word-painting, which reaches its apogee in the bravura
cimbalom effects of ‘Die drei Zigeuner’, but can be found throughout his out-
put, whether describing a goblet being cast into the sea (‘Es war ein König in
Thule’), a nightingale (‘Die tote Nachtigall’) or the calling of ancestral spirits
(‘Die Vätergruft’). Liszt’s fondness for pianistic scene-setting in ‘Im Rhein’
can be directly compared with Schumann’s treatment of the same lyric
(in Dichterliebe). Schumann’s majestic lapidary accompaniment continues
unvaried throughout the Lied, but does not seem particularly intended to
be descriptive of the river. Liszt, in the first version of his song, produces
a cinematic accompaniment where the rolling of the river impinges upon
the listener’s attention even when the poet’s gaze is distracted elsewhere. In
the second version the river music (now somewhat subdued) is brought to
a sudden, even histrionic, halt as the singer ecstatically contemplates the
picture of the Madonna that reminds him of his beloved. For Liszt this con-
templation is happily uncomplicated, for Schumann it brings forth mixed
emotions perhaps more in keeping with the irony of Heine’s lyric. In any
case, Schumann’s concentration on the emotional import of the words is in
stark contrast to Liszt’s bravura emphasis on the pictorial background.
Liszt’s response to poetry did, however, frequently transcend superficial
tone painting to produce music of genuine depth and perception, some-
times in conjunction with elaborately sophisticated harmony that vividly
conveys the emotions inherent in a lyric. Particularly powerful examples
are his settings of Heine’s ‘Vergiftet sind meine Lieder’ (1844, revised 1860)
where a grating, dissonant harmonic language strewn with augmented triads
harshly empathises with the poet’s vindictive mood, or of Georg Herwegh’s
‘Ich möchte hingehn’, where the music’s almost painfully extended suspen-
sions tell of the morbid dissatisfaction and death-longing in the poet’s soul.
Liszt identified particularly strongly with the latter song, describing it as his
‘testament of youth’,10 and his harmonic radicalism is naturally most often
associated with embittered lyrics such as this, or with the bleak despair of
songs such as Freiligrath’s ‘Und wir dachten der Toten’, only twenty-three
bars long, but of a macabre intensity that strikes the listener with unforget-
table force. Of happier demeanour, but of equal harmonic daring, are ‘Wie
singt die Lerche schön’ with its lilting arpeggiated ninth-chords and ‘Ihr
Glocken von Marling’, in which gently struck sevenths and ninths charm-
ingly imitate the delicate tintinnabulations of the eponymous bells.
Despite the occasional criticism over misplaced word-stress or over-
complicated accompaniments, the best of Liszt’s Lieder are both admirable
and moving. When a poem completely captured his imagination, he was

capable of producing such masterpieces as his revised settings of Hugo’s ‘Oh!
quand je dors’ and Goethe’s ‘Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh’. The first captivates
on the strength of its truly outstanding melody – suave yet expressive –
and tasteful touches of harmonic colour, such as the unexpected mediant
harmony on the singer’s very last note, held for nearly four bars over a
gentle resolution in the piano. ‘Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh’ similarly main-
tains constant control to match almost miraculously the meditative stillness
of Goethe’s world-famous lyric. Subtle exploitation of vocal register (at
‘schweigen im Walde’, or the final ‘balde ruhest du auch’) and a perfectly
judged accompaniment, which supports the melody in a sophisticated but
faultlessly unobtrusive manner, achieve an intensification of the poem while
maintaining the introspection at its core. Had Liszt published no other songs
apart from these, he would still have to be ranked among the very finest cre-
ators of Romantic Lieder.
Revisions
The vast majority of Liszt’s songs from 1839 to 1847 were radically revised
during his Weimar period, by which time he had come to believe that
they were ‘mostly too ultra-sentimental, and frequently too full in the
accompaniment’.11 ‘Loreley’, for example, was composed for voice and piano
in 1841, arranged for piano solo in 1844, and subsequently revised for voice
and piano in 1856. A version for voice and orchestra was made in 1860, and
a reworked piano solo arrangement appeared in 1861. Even after all this
he could not leave the piece alone and added eight more bars for a French
version of the song published in 1883. Liszt’s dissatisfaction with his earlier
music was certainly not confined to his Lieder, but he cast a particularly
censorious eye over many of them, excising what he had come to regard
as pointless repetition, simplifying the piano parts and correcting errors in
declamation. Sometimes, as with ‘Du bist wie eine Blume’ (original ver-
sion 1842, revision 1859), Liszt’s slimmed-down second thoughts left the
basic concept and much of the detail of the original song intact, but in the
more radical cases, such as ‘Schwebe, schwebe, blaues Auge’ (original ver-
sion 1845, revised 1860), or ‘Der du von dem Himmel bist’ (original version
1842, first revision 1856, second revision 1860, and yet another fragmen-
tary version published posthumously in 1918, but probably dating sometime
between 1856 and 1860), the later versions are so different from the first as
virtually to constitute new songs in their own right.
Despite the pains Liszt took to refine his musical conception in many
of the Lieder, his revisions are not uniformly successful. Although his
compositional technique undoubtedly gained in sophistication and sub-

tlety during his Weimar years, he occasionally pruned his youthful excesses
somewhat too ruthlessly, and some early versions have retained a more
vivid appeal. Moreover, the revision of certain songs seems inevitably to
have been prompted as much by differences in musical taste between the
younger and the older Liszt as by a desire to correct obvious compositional
faults. After finishing the first version of the Petrarch Sonnets, for example,
Liszt expressed special pride in them in a letter to Marie d’Agoult a little
before their appearance in 1846:
Among my forthcoming publications, if you have time to pay any attention

to them, you will be able (after dinner) to look at three Petrarch Sonnets
(Benedetto, etc . . . Pace non trovo . . . and I’vidi in terra) for voice, and also
very free transcriptions of them for piano, in the style of nocturnes! I regard
them as having turned out singularly well, and more finished in form than
any of the things I have published.12
This did not prevent him, after only a few years, from becoming dissat-
isfied with the piano transcriptions and from substantially revising them
for inclusion in the Italian volume of Années de pèlerinage. Decades later,
in 1883, he published a drastically altered version of the songs themselves,
which had long ceased to please the more ascetic tastes of their now aged
composer. Writing to his friend Giuseppe Ferrazzi in 1880, he seemed to
find the revised songs not only superior to their earlier form, but almost too
delicate to set before the public:
As for my 3 Petrarch Sonnets . . . piano transcriptions of them were brought

out long ago by Schott (Mainz); but I hesitate to publish the second original
version (much modified and refined) for voice, for to express the feeling that
I tried to breathe into the musical notation of these Sonnets would call for
some poetic singer, enamoured of an ideal of love . . . rarae aves in terris.13
Liszt’s fear of misunderstanding here was well founded. The bare musi-
cal notation, almost skeletal in comparison to the ornate profusion of the
original version, hardly seems to express the intensity of feeling felt by the
composer, despite some finer points of declamation. Few have preferred
the etiolated 1883 edition of the Sonnets to their passionate and exuberant
originals.
A similar, if less stark, situation exists with Drei Lieder aus
Schillers ‘Wilhelm Tell’ (the version for piano and voice first written around
1845, then appearing in a revised version in 1859), namely ‘Der Fischer-
knabe’, ‘Der Hirt’, and ‘Der Alpenjäger’. The first edition is the nearest Liszt
got to composing a song cycle. Well-contrasted in mood and texture, the
songs are directed to be performed without a break, and the third closes
with the recall of a melody from the first. The accompaniment is among the
most ambitious and taxing of Liszt’s Lieder, particularly in the final number
where a storm rages in the piano part with a virtuosity closely related to
‘Orage’ from the Swiss Année de pèlerinage. Although the songs still fol-
lowed each other without a pause in the revision, the work was severely
cut, the thematic reminiscence at the end of the third song omitted, and
the accompaniment slimmed-down almost to the point of emaciation. The
waves in ‘Der Fischerknabe’ no longer surge luxuriantly, but rather lap
placidly, and the storm in ‘Der Alpenjäger’ seems more suitable for a teacup
than the Alps. Liszt identified unerringly the faults of the original – it is
indeed rather prolix and over-flamboyant – and his revision certainly dis-
plays greater concision and economy of means, featuring several fascinating
harmonic turns absent from the first version. The cost, nevertheless, seems
excessive.
For many of the other songs revised by Liszt during his Weimar years,
recomposition did indeed bring a maturity and refinement missing from
the original version. Few would regret, for example, the trimming down of
the hyperbolic accompaniment to the 1844 ‘Enfant, si j’étais roi’ and the
generally less histrionic approach to text setting, which not only allows the
singer more freedom of expression here, but also emphasises the fundamen-
tal strength of Liszt’s harmonic imagination. Similar comments might be
made about the reworkings of ‘Es war ein König in Thule’ and ‘Loreley’. The
new opening of the revision of the latter, with its striking adumbration of
the prelude to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, usually receives the lion’s share
of attention in any discussion, but equally important is the alteration of the
metre of the main melody from a rather facile 68 to a much more plastic
and sophisticated 98 – a masterstroke that shows just how much Liszt’s basic
compositional technique had developed between 1844 and 1856.
One other category of revision, mentioned earlier as most drastically
exemplified by ‘Der du von dem Himmel bist’, deserves consideration now:
that in which the recomposition is so radical that the revisions can best be
considered as a new setting of the text. The 1842 version of this song, entitled
‘Invocation’ in the original publication if not in some modern editions,
is gifted with a profoundly beautiful main melody – one of Liszt’s great
Romantic tunes – but otherwise shows the composer at his most rambling
and over-effusive. After a musing, improvisatory opening, text-repetition
begins with the fourth line of the poem, and soon reaches almost ludicrously
exaggerated levels as the singer asks, ‘Was soll all der Schmerz und Lust?’
not just once, but four times with ever increasing hysteria, like some crazed
professor at an oral exam in metaphysics. Having harped on this point so
melodramatically, Liszt is then forced for reasons of balance to go to even

greater lengths in emphasising ‘Süsser Friede, komm, ach komm in meine
Brust’, a request made six times, sometimes quietly, sometimes cajolingly,
sometimes self-defeatingly fervently, before the singer has exhausted all
obvious styles of delivery, and the piano brings the proceedings to a belated
close.
Rarely did a song cry out for extensive pruning more than this one. The
first revision, published in 1856 still under the title ‘Invocation’, at once
presents a more temperate demeanour with the excision of two otiose bars
from the end of the simplified piano introduction. The rather sentimen-
tal chromaticism in the vocal line at ‘Schmerzen stillest’ and ‘Erquickung
füllest’ is eliminated, although the nagging obsession with ‘Was soll all der
Schmerz und Lust’ continues in a somewhat more lightly scored format. The
beckoning of ‘Süsser Friede’ is, however, treated less melodramatically, and
the subsequent full-scale recapitulation of the main melody in the piano is
omitted entirely (losing eight bars altogether) no doubt because this pas-
sage was the source of the most egregious examples of futile text-repetition,
with the singer waffling on inconsequentially in the background while the
pianist made the most of being centre-stage. In a subtle stroke, transformed
fragments of the main theme now appear in a re-composed coda, produc-
ing a sophisticated symmetry evidently beyond the range of the original
version.
Liszt was still not entirely satisfied with this Lied. A manuscript page
that probably dates from the late 1850s shows him beginning yet another,
unfinished, attempt at further simplification. In the end he decided to cut the
Gordian knot entirely by producing in 1860 what is virtually a new setting
of the text. This could almost have been written by a different composer,
so much more sensitive and economical is its treatment of the words, and
so much wider its harmonic imagination. Probably in deference to its new-
found sense of spiritual calm, this song was no longer called ‘Invocation’. A
notably greater plasticity of phrasing is aided by the alteration of the time
signature from 34 to 44 (cf. ‘Loreley’), and the re-composition of the main
tune avoids the slightly over-facile melodic structure of the previous setting.
This transfigured melody is one of the few points of contact with the earlier
versions. Repetitious posturing has, however, vanished (‘Süsser Friede’ is
invoked only once), and a new, raptly meditative introduction and postlude
for the piano are added. The vocal part is now written with sensitivity to
tessitura that makes a striking effect in the final line, as the singer reaches
into the lower octave in a moving prayer for inner peace. Were all Liszt’s
revisions as perfectly focused as this, few singers would bother with the
original versions.
The piano transcriptions
Relatively few of Liszt’s songs exist in more than one keyboard arrangement,
which at least means that the solo pianist is not faced with the baffling
plethora of revised versions encountered by singer and accompanist. Liszt
made a solo arrangement of the original version of ‘Der du von dem Himmel
bist’, for example, but not of the revisions. This is hardly surprising, as the
more sophisticated treatment of the vocal tessitura in the final version would
be largely lost in a transfer to the piano, and the contemplative nature of the
music is much more closely tied to the meaning of the words than in the
previous settings. Although most of the early songs from 1839–45 exist in
solo piano arrangements (‘Vergiftet sind meine Lieder’ of 1842 was the first
to remain untranscribed), the same is not true for their revisions, or for the
songs composed later. Perhaps partly because during his Weimar years Liszt
was anxious to alter the public perception of him as a composer wedded to
the keyboard, he made revised editions only of the piano transcriptions of
‘Die Loreley’, ‘Die Zelle in Nonnenwerth’ and the Petrarch Sonnets, but left
other arrangements unaltered, even after a new version of a song had been
composed. Some transcriptions of early songs were published individually,
like ‘Il m’aimait tant’ and ‘Die Zelle in Nonnenwerth’, others in 1844 in a
collection of six which Liszt entitled Buch der Lieder für Klavier allein in
an allusion to Heine’s well-known Buch der Lieder. This did not, however,
feature only Heine settings, but included ‘Angiolin’, ‘Der du von dem Him-
mel bist’ and ‘Es war ein König in Thule’. A second Buch der Lieder für
Klavier allein was composed slightly later, but remained unpublished until
long after Liszt’s death. It consists entirely of Victor Hugo settings, namely
‘Enfant, si j’étais roi’, ‘Oh! quand je dors’, ‘Comment, disaient-ils’, ‘S’il est
un charmant gazon’, ‘La tombe et la rose’ and ‘Gastibelza’.
Although Liszt was assiduous in including the words in the score of all of
his song transcriptions, evaluated purely as piano music the arrangements
achieve a varied degree of success. In the transcription of ‘Die Loreley’, for
example, the motivation of some details of the turbulently illustrative ‘ship-
wreck’ music in the central section is rather difficult to bring across without
the words, although the winsome beauty of the lilting main melody is as
appealing on the keyboard as it is in the voice. The overall musical struc-
ture is perfectly comprehensible, if slightly impoverished, when separated
from the poem. In one significant respect, however, Liszt’s transcriptions
sometimes score over the original songs: over-repetition of text or clumsy
word-accentuation can hardly be a problem in a piano solo, with the result
that listening to a transcription like that of the first version of ‘Der du von
dem Himmel bist’ is arguably a more satisfying experience than listening to
a singer emote through the often naı̈ve vocal part. Here a truly memorable
melody can be enjoyed purely for itself in an imaginative and apt piano
setting that exploits Liszt’s unsurpassed mastery of keyboard colour.
A similar example is the celebrated third ‘Liebestraum’, which acquired
vast popularity during Liszt’s lifetime and may well have been the last piece
of his own that he heard played before his death.14 This is a transcription
of his setting of Freiligrath’s poem ‘O lieb, so lang du lieben kannst’, a lyric
that is either gently ironic or nauseously sentimental, depending on the
reader’s interpretation. Liszt obviously considered it to be the former, and
on one occasion directed a piano student to play the Liebestraum in ‘a fairly
forward-moving tempo’, adding: ‘You must play that more like ‘O love, as
long as you wish to love’; that’s how it usually is, and it usually doesn’t last
very long. Therefore play it somewhat more frivolously!’15 Unfortunately,
such an interpretation is easier to project in the solo piano version than
in the song, where the famous melody, sung to Freiligrath’s superficially
maudlin words, tends unavoidably to produce the sentimental effect Liszt
warned against. The piano version is, moreover, musically more concise,
with a surer climax that is not interrupted by the disappointingly banal
recitative passages at ‘Und hüte deine Zunge wohl. Bald ist ein böses Wort
gesagt.’ Posterity is, in this case, surely right to have preferred the ‘song
without words’ to the song, the boundless ‘dream of love’ to the severely
time-limited ‘love as long as you can’.
Many of Liszt’s Lieder remained on the periphery of the central repertoire
for a number of reasons, but most prominently for the dramatic qualities
that cause some of them to hover indecisively between salon, concert hall
and stage – anything but the drawing-room setting of their early-nineteenth-
century counterparts. Despite the composer’s extolling of simplicity in the
genre, such a quality did not come easily to him, and was often only achieved
after extensive second (or even third) thoughts. In this respect the shadow
of the mature opera that Liszt was never to complete fell over some of his
finest songs, and the general style of the Petrarch Sonnets, for example, or
even of his setting of ‘Mignons Lied’, bears a close relation to the sketches for
Sardanapale that he placed such hopes upon before he ceded the operatic
realm to his friend Wagner. Such concerns seem to have informed the per-
formance of his songs, too, and a witness to a rendition in 1870 of ‘Mignons
Lied’ with Liszt at the piano described ‘the song under his hands becoming
a complete drama’.16 It is no surprise that this is one of the songs Liszt him-
self arranged for voice and orchestra, along with ‘Die Loreley’, Drei Lieder
aus Schillers ‘Wilhelm Tell’, ‘Die Drei Zigeuner’, ‘Jeanne d’Arc’ and ‘Die
Vätergruft’. With an orchestral arrangement, the intimacy that some have
believed is at the heart of the Lied is necessarily gone, and Liszt, with Berlioz,
was one of the first proponents of what was to become a new orchestral
genre, even arranging seven of the most famous Lieder of Schubert (such
as ‘Erlkönig’) out of the parlour and into the concert hall. It is tempting to
see in this expansion of the genre’s range similarities with Liszt’s ambitions
to unite religion with the theatre in his choral music (or, as Hanslick put it,
‘to bring the Venusberg into the church’17 ) and the obverse side of reducing
his songs to the compass of two hands at one keyboard in a piano transcrip-
tion. With both these strategies Liszt may have taken the Lied beyond its
original confines, but in doing so he won it new audiences in new venues,
and laid the basis for the inspired flourishing of orchestral song among the
late Romantics.
10 Liszt’s symphonic poems and symphonies
re eve s s h u l s ta d
When I look back upon your activity in these last years, you appear superhuman to me; there is
something very strange about this. However, it is very natural that creating is our only joy, and
alone makes life bearable to us. We are what we are only while we create; all the other functions of
life have no meaning for us, and are at the bottom concessions to the vulgarity of ordinary human
existence, which can give us no satisfaction. ( richard wagner to liszt, 7 june 1855)1
During his tenure at the court of Weimar, Franz Liszt focused much of
his creative energy towards composing orchestral music, primarily his sym-
phonic poems and symphonies. Liszt received the title of Court Kapellmeis-
ter Extraordinary on 2 November 18422 and eventually moved to Weimar in
1848 with Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein. As Detlef Altenburg outlines in
his article ‘Franz Liszt and the Legacy of the Classical Era’, Liszt and Grand
Duke Carl Alexander viewed Liszt’s appointment as in artistic succession to
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1775–1832) rather than the previous most
celebrated Kapellmeister, Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1819–37).3 In this
spirit, Liszt organised several festivals celebrating German artists in Weimar,
beginning with the Goethe Festival in August 1849. Many of Liszt’s sym-
phonic poems, symphonies and other orchestral works are products of his
aim to revive the ‘Weimar spirit’. Even the works that are not directly con-
nected to a Weimar figure are still part of his desire to reignite the creativity
associated with the Goethezeit. In addition, Liszt considered his orchestral
compositions to be a continuation of Beethoven’s achievement. According
to a view strongly held by Liszt and Wagner, the symphony – with the excep-
tion of Berlioz – had become stagnant after Beethoven. Liszt saw it as his
mission to take orchestral composition further along the path initiated by
the great symphonist.
Symphonic poems
The twelve symphonic poems composed during Liszt’s Weimar years were
published between 1856 and 1861 and all are dedicated to Liszt’s partner,
Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein. Like its predecessor the concert overture,
each symphonic poem is a one-movement piece with a programmatic title
and most have a preface.4 In fact, there was originally no difference at
[206] all between the concert overture and what came to be referred to as the
Example 10.1 Tasso, bars 1–7
Lento
Ob. and Cl.
Motive 1
Vc. and Cb.

3 3
3 3
Motive 2
4
molto dim.
‘symphonic poem’, and several of the earlier pieces were titled ‘overture’
on their first performance. The literary, philosophical, and historical back-
ground of each work’s topic character or subject provides a lens through
which to interpret each work; some connections, however, are more tenuous
than others.
Four of the symphonic poems, Tasso, Orpheus, Prometheus, and
Mazeppa, sketch characters of creative genius, heroism and/or legend. In his
preface to his symphonic poem Tasso, completed in 1854, Liszt stated that
the first version of this piece had served as an overture for Goethe’s Torquato
Tasso, which was performed during the Weimar Goethe Centenary Festival.5
In revising the piece into the ‘revolutionary’ genre of the symphonic
poem, however, Liszt found Byron’s poem The Lament of Tasso (1817)
to be much more directly inspiring than Goethe, because of the empa-
thy Byron evoked for the ‘unfortunate poet’.6 In an analogy to the poem’s
depiction of Tasso’s oscillation between extreme mental states, the two open-
ing motives of the symphonic poem are presented in strikingly different
settings in the first sixty-one bars of the piece. See Example 10.1. After the
hesitant and ambiguous beginning, the two motives become strikingly terse
and furious in the Allegro strepitoso section (bars 27–53), but soon motive 1
decelerates back to the halting character of the Lento section (bars 54–61).
With the Adagio mesto section (bar 62), C minor is firmly established,
beginning an exposition in sonata form.7 Liszt claims to have heard gondo-
liers in Venice singing the stark principal theme to the first lines of Tasso’s
Gerusalemme liberata: ‘Canto l’armi pietose e’l Capitano/Che’l gran Sepo-
lcro liberò di Cristo!’ (I sing of the reverent armies and the captain who
208 Reeves Shulstad
liberated Christ’s great sepulchre).8 Liszt had used this melody for the first
time in the 1840 version of his piano piece Venezia e Napoli, marking the
theme ‘Chant du Gondolier’.
The Romantics regarded alienation as a prominent characteristic of the
artistic genius, and self- and social alienation are certainly present in Byron’s
Tasso. Perhaps a hint of this is also present in the formal and tonal plan of
Liszt’s symphonic poem? The secondary theme of this piece is in the distant
key of E major. The move to the major key of the raised third in a minor-key
piece had strongly evoked a sense of distance and alienation in Schubert’s
Heine Lieder of the Schwanengesang, a work Liszt may have had in the
back of his mind. In ‘Der Atlas’ and ‘Der Doppelgänger’, for example, texts
dealing with self-alienation are presented in the key of the raised third.9
Liszt transcribed most of Schwanengesang in 1838–9, altering the sequence
of the songs but of course maintaining the original key relationships within
the songs. He used this same raised-third relationship, probably with a
similar affective intention, in Prometheus and the first movement of the
Faust Symphony.
In Tasso, tonal expectations continue to be subverted as a Recitativo,
espressivo assai (bars 145–64) leads into a Minuet section in F major. The
Minuet was not added until Liszt’s final 1856 version of this piece and brings
with it the connotation of courtly culture. The entire section is constructed
as a set of variations on the minuet theme (a transformation of the principal
melody of the piece) and is tonally extremely distant from the work’s tonic,
thus increasing the sense of dissociation. The strepitoso section returns in
bars 348–75 and serves as a bridge to a triumphal C major recapitulation.
Orpheus, composed in 1853–4, was first performed in Weimar on 16
February 1854 as a prelude to Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice.
The performance helped celebrate the birthday of Weimar’s Grand Duchess
Maria Pawlowna, who was an amateur musician and a staunch supporter
of Liszt at Weimar. In his preface Liszt describes an Etruscan vase depicting
Orpheus, and extols music’s civilising effect on humanity. This reference to
the ennobling effect of Orpheus and his art seems to be derived from the
Orpheus portrayed in Orphée (1829) by the Lyon philosopher Pierre-Simon
Ballanche (1776–1847). The Orpheus of this nine-volume odyssey, the only
completed part of Ballanche’s larger Palingénésie Sociale, leads humanity into
the modern age by introducing civilised laws; it was intended to provide a
new philosophy for all of Europe.10 Liszt was an acquaintance and avid
supporter of Ballanché, and his enthusiasm was shared by members of the
French salons during the 1830s, especially by George Sand.11
The first element of Liszt’s Orpheus to consider is instrumentation, pre-
dominantly featuring Orpheus’s lyre. The scoring includes two harps, and
the representation of the lyre by the harp’s arpeggios in the Introduction
(bars 1–14) immediately focuses the listener’s attention on this instrument,

metonymic with Orpheus’s power. The harpist Jeanne Pohl, one of the new
virtuoso performers brought in by Liszt to bolster the Weimar orchestra,
inspired these harp effects.12 Formally, Orpheus is a modified sonata form
with a secondary key area containing two themes. The second theme, a static
motive hovering over oscillating major and minor harmonies (bars 85–96),
lacks the energy of the first, but has an especially poignant quality, wistfully
presented by various solo instruments to a primarily harp accompaniment.
The orchestration, together with the style, prompts an interpretation of this
theme as Orpheus’s voice.
The ethereal, chromatic ascent in the final bars of this piece attenuates any
decisive closure that might be expected from a more conventional harmonic
resolution. This, in combination with a last transformation of the closing
theme of the second group, ends the work as a cryptic vision. This musical
moment recalls the final moments of Ballanche’s story, where the narrator,
Thamyris, witnesses Orpheus disappearing into the clouds, leaving mankind
with the task of developing his teachings of civilisation. Unlike many of
Liszt’s other symphonic poems, Orpheus is largely contemplative, and avoids
the usual jubilantly assertive peroration. It was a favourite of Wagner’s for
that very reason.
Prometheus is a product of several revisions of an overture to Liszt’s
choral setting of Herder’s Der entfesselte Prometheus (1802), which was first
performed on 24 August 1850 for the Herder Festival in Weimar.13 Herder’s
dramatic scenes are a Romantic sequel to Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound.14 In
1855 Liszt turned the overture into a symphonic poem and the choruses into
a concert stage work. For the performance of the revised choruses, Richard
Pohl, a noted critic and supporter of the New German School who was in
Weimar from 1854 to 1864, condensed Herder’s work into prologues to be
read before each chorus. Unlike Herder’s allegorical text, Pohl’s prologues
develop Prometheus’ character, and emphasise Prometheus’ sufferings and
turbulent relationship with Zeus:
He [Prometheus] stole and gave to mankind a godlike ornament, the

creative fire. – Relentlessly for such guilt he received the gods’ hate and
punishment: so that he would learn to give honour to Zeus’s sovereign
power, and end his love for mankind . . . The lively hound, Zeus’s
blood-thirsty eagle, an uninvited visitor came every day sent down from
him, harrowingly tearing apart his flesh with claws, satisfying himself by
bloody robbery of his liver. Prometheus does not bend. His hatred for the
gods remains.15
Pohl’s description of Prometheus’ treatment in the first Prologue creates

an intensity that is not present in Herder’s drama, and that intensity is
210 Reeves Shulstad
carried over into the symphonic poem. A furious version of Prometheus is

clearly represented in the radical opening of the work (bars 1–26), marked
Allegro energico ed agitato assai, and in the principal material (bars 48–61)
marked Allegro molto appassionato (see Table 10.1). The opening material
consists of an agitated gesture over a tremolo (bars 1–6) which leads into a
Maestoso section (bars 13–26).16 At the end of the Maestoso (bars 22–6), a
hint of the principal material is foreshadowed. Largely based on chords of the
diminished seventh, this agitated music evidently represents Prometheus’
physical and spiritual ‘souffrance’.
As shown in Table 10.1, from the choruses Liszt derived the passage
marked Recitativo (bars 27–47), the secondary section, and the fugal third
section. After the principal section (bars 48–115) and another appearance
of the instrumental recitative, the secondary section begins in D major.
The thematic material comes from the ‘Chor der Unsichtbaren’, which was
originally in E major. At this point in the drama Prometheus has been freed,
an olive tree has sprouted from the rock where he was bound, and the
chorus praises the wise Themis, the goddess of Justice. The presence of this
thematic material at this moment in the symphonic poem probably does
not, however, represent justice eventually served to Prometheus. The use of
D major, the raised third of A minor, rather than the dominant, E major,
which convention might have led the listener to expect, is perhaps another
reference to Romantic alienation.17 The fact that while the thematic material
appears in E major in the choruses Liszt chose not to use that key in the
symphonic poem gives some support to this interpretation.
The fugato section (bars 161–84) continues in the second-group key, the
first part of its subject originating from the ‘Chor der Musen’. Preceding this
chorus in the drama, Themis praised Prometheus for his greatest attribute:
perseverance. That this fugue possibly represents not only this perseverance
(in a similar fashion to the fugue in the Purgatorio movement of the Dante
Symphony), but also Prometheus’ creative genius, is supported by the fact
that this material is taken from the ‘Chor der Musen’.
Mazeppa, composed between 1851 and 1856, is prefaced by a poem by
Victor Hugo, but Liszt also includes an incipit from Byron’s poem of the
same name. The first half of Hugo’s Mazeppa describes the wild ride of the
Ukrainian hetman (Polish/Cossack military leader) tied naked to a horse,
while the triumphal second half relates Mazeppa’s ride to the euphoria of
art. The symphonic poem combines thematic material from the Transcen-
dental Study ‘Mazeppa’ with the Arbeiterchor of 1848.18 Following a 36-bar
introduction of agitato triplets, the trombones present the main theme in D
minor. After several variations of that theme, there is a sparsely orchestrated,
recitative-like Andante section (bars 403–35). The work is concluded by an
optimistic Allegro marziale with new thematic material.
Table 10.1 Prometheus: Musical analysis and relationships between the symphonic poem and the choruses
Bar Section/subsections Theme/motive Tonality Dynamics/orchestration Choral derivation
1–47 INTRODUCTION
1–6 Allegro energico ed 1O a p/f
agitato assai
6–12
13–26 Maestoso, un poco 2O /viiN 7/a ff
ritenuto
N
27–47 Andante (Recitativo) Bridge vii 7/a sparse No. 3 Chor der Dryaden (bars
43–77) Alto Solo
48–115 SECTION 1
48–61 Allegro molto P(2 O) a
appassionato; agitato
assai
62–77 t
78–83 1O Tr. and Tps.
84–101 t
102–15 P and Bridge
116–28 Ritenuto, il tempo Bridge fragment of No. 3

(quasi Recitativo)
129–60 SECTION 2
A tempo espressivo S D p No. 7 Chor der Unsichtbaren
Dolce (25–51)
161–236 SECTION 3
161–84 Allegro moderato Fugato D/ Marcato strings No. 8 Chor der Musen
Continued
Table 10.1 (Cont.)
Bar Section/subsections Theme/motive Tonality Dynamics/orchestration Choral derivation
185–205 F subject polychorally divided,

eventually overlapping (b.
198)
206–13 F A ff; divided (instrumentation
reversed)
213–36 F/P
237–443 SECTION 4
237–44 Allegro energico ed 1O
agitato assai
245–9 P
250–68 Andante (Recitativo) Bridge No. 3 Chor der Dryaden (bars

43–77) Alto Solo
*269–303 Allegro molto P a
appassionato
304–21 Stretto; Più animato S E
322–51 F (frag.)
352–63 F
364–90 S A
391–443 Poco a poco sempre più F, 1 O A

stringendo sin al fine
Notes:
*Optional
Analytical symbols: the symbols for my musical analysis are based on those from Jan LaRue’s Guidelines for Style Analysis (New York: Norton, 1970), 154–63. The letters indicate the following:
O = introductory material; P = primary materials; t = transitional or other episodic, unstable functions; S = secondary materials; F = fugato; N = new material introduced after the conclusion
of an exposition in sonata form. Parentheses indicate thematic derivatives. I have added other symbols where needed, which are explained in the text.
Three of the symphonic poems, Ce qu’on entend sur la montagne, Les

Préludes, and Die Ideale, are directly or indirectly associated with poems
that do not deal with a specific protagonist. Ce qu’on entend sur la montagne
is prefaced by a poem by Victor Hugo from Feuilles d’Automne (1829).
Four versions of the work appeared between the years 1847 and 1856. Harp
arpeggios (bars 33–8) provide an introduction to the primary material (bars
38–43), an undulating and tonally unstable theme that returns frequently
throughout this extensive piece. The Maestoso secondary theme beginning in
bar 95 is first heard in F major followed by trumpet calls in E major (bars
155–66). Although not every part of the symphonic poem has a specific
literary analogy, a chorale-style section (bars 477–518) marked Andante
religioso certainly recalls the ‘hymne heureux!’ in Hugo’s work.
As with Prometheus, Les Préludes was originally conceived as an introduc-
tion for a cantata, Les Quatres Eléments in 1844–5. It consisted of settings of
four poems by Joseph Autran (1813–77): ‘La Terre’, ‘Les Aquilons’, ‘Les Flots’
and ‘Les Astres’ and was never published. Liszt later revised the overture to
this work and renamed it Les Préludes in 1854.19
Although Les Préludes was thus obviously not originally inspired by
Lamartine, poem and symphonic poem are a fairly appropriate, if hardly a
particularly specific, match. The four general themes that are present in the
poem – love, sorrow, aggression, and a Romantic pastoralism – are mirrored
in the music. The secondary material, marked Cantando and Espressivo ma
tranquillo, is of an evidently amorous nature, and the other three facets cor-
respond to expressive markings in the score: Allegro tempestoso, Allegretto
pastorale, and Allegro marziale animato. The last includes a trumpet fanfare
recalling Lamartine’s ‘La trompette a jeté le signal des alarmes: aux armes!’,
which is quoted proudly in the symphonic poem preface, perhaps because
it is the only passage in the whole musical work that might sound as if it is
directly, rather than vaguely, derived from the poem.
Die Ideale, composed between 1856 and 1857, was from the start intended
to be a musical counterpart to Schiller’s eponymous poem, and was first per-
formed on 3 September 1857 for the centenary of the birth of Carl August,
Grand Duke of Weimar. This enormous work has passages from Friedrich
Schiller’s poem printed throughout the score. The passages are titled as
follows: ‘Ideals’ (bars 1–25); ‘Aspirations’ (bars 26–453); ‘Disillusion’ (454–
567); ‘Employment’ (568–679); and ‘Apotheosis’ (680 to the end). The ‘Aspi-
rations’ section establishes the tonic of F major after the tonally ambiguous
opening. The second section eventually settles into C minor and, after a pas-
sage of E major, the third section continues in this minor key. Perhaps not
surprisingly the grandiose Apotheosis – Liszt’s addition to Schiller’s poetic
scheme – ends the piece in the tonic major.20
214 Reeves Shulstad
Originally Liszt conceived Héroı̈de funèbre as the first movement of Sym-

phonie révolutionnaire (1830). There are two versions of the symphonic
poem, one from 1850, and a revised version from 1854 to 1856 that is far
more subtle and varied in orchestration, although the thematic and for-
mal outlines remain much the same. The preface of this work focuses on
the allegedly unique immobility of grief in human existence – everything
else about humanity changes, yet grief is the one true constant. The 31-bar
introduction begins with a slow dirge-like rhythm in the percussion fol-
lowed by anguished chords in the woodwinds and brass. The main funeral
march begins in bar 32 in F minor, with a subsequent trio section, marked
Più lento, in D major. Eventually both the March and the Trio return in F,
producing a slow-movement sonata form of convincing structure and vivid
emotional impact.
Three of the symphonic poems have no preface at all. Liszt began the
composition of the first, Festklänge, in 1853, publishing it in 1856 but then
adding four ‘Variants’ to the score in 1861. He composed this piece as ‘wed-
ding music’ for his eventually thwarted marriage to the Princess zu Sayn-
Wittgenstein. Her Polish heritage was represented by the polonaise rhythms
in the work, which were made more pervasive in the 1861 revision. The
biographical connection between Liszt himself and Hungaria, the second,
is an obvious one. Celebrating native artists became a way of rallying Hun-
gary’s nationalistic spirit, and Liszt was embraced by the country as one of its
most famous and respected representatives in Europe. Although he strongly
supported Hungary’s effort to exert its own distinctive national identity,
he did not join more radical voices that advocated a complete severance
from Austria.21 Throughout his later years Liszt remained a true Hungarian
patriot (‘I remain, until death, Hungary’s true and grateful son’22 ), and his
feelings towards his homeland are given extensive expression in Hungaria.
The first section of this piece (bars 1–132) contains the stylistic character-
istics of the Hungarian verbunkos or recruiting dance music. The verbunkos
grew in popularity in the late eighteenth century in Hungary and became
more stylised in the nineteenth, when it acquired associations with Hun-
garian national pride.23 Primary characteristics include alternating slow
and fast sections (lassu and friss), sharply accentuated rhythms (frequently
dotted and triplet) and profuse violinistic ornamentation.
All of the aforementioned characteristics are present in the first 132 bars
of Hungaria. Largo con duolo sections alternate with an Andante marziale in
a contrast of lassu and friss, and the thematic material beginning in bar 18
has the rhythmic style associated with the verbunkos. This material is very
similar to the third movement of the ‘First Hungarian Society Dance’ (1842)
by Márk Rózsavölgyi, a well-known violin virtuoso who primarily helped
to establish the late verbunkos style with his ‘society dances’ and chamber
music.24 The violin solo beginning in bar 132 of Hungaria, and most notably
the cadenza ad lib. passage in bar 141, can be associated with the verbunkos
style and also with Hungarian/gypsy music in general. Liszt had already
used the thematic material from the Andante marziale section in the 1840
Heroic March in Hungarian Style for piano. The secondary material begins
in bar 242 in B major, and from bar 425 it is juxtaposed with the primary
material in a funeral-march section. Here the music presents the results of
extreme nationalistic fervour: the deaths of many Hungarians during the
1848 revolution. Faith in the future of the Hungarian nation, however, is
eventually affirmed as the Allegro eroica secondary material, which Liszt also
used in the Heroic March in Hungarian style, triumphantly returns in the
tonic major.
Although Hamlet, the third symphonic poem, does not have a preface,
it was intended to depict specific scenes from Shakespeare’s play.25 Liszt
composed this work in 1858 after a private performance of the drama on
25 June of that same year. The opening motive, marked Molto lento e lugubre,
was intended as a setting of Hamlet’s soliloquy from Act III. The rest of the
opening section, bars 9–73, is melancholic and agitated. After a quicker
Allegro appassionato ed agitato assai in B minor, the horns and trumpets
leap out with an exclamatory fanfare. The centrepiece of this symphonic
poem is the episode between Hamlet and Ophelia.26 Ophelia first appears
in bar 160, as we know through Liszt’s footnote reference to her in the score.
Her recitative-like passage is interrupted by an Allegro section in which the
strings and bassoons are marked Ironico in a depiction of Hamlet’s ‘get thee
to a nunnery’. The work ends in despondency and despair with a funeral
march for Hamlet’s death.
Hunnenschlacht was composed in 1857. Liszt’s preface reveals that he
was inspired by Wilhelm von Kaulbach’s (1805–74) imposing painting, The
Battle of the Huns: ‘It seemed to me that [Kaulbach’s] idea might suitably
be transferred to music and that this art was capable of reproducing the
impression of the two supernatural and contrasting lights, by means of two
motives.’ The two themes presented in this work are the Crux fidelis chant
and a ‘Schlachtruf ’ (Battle Cry). After a tempestuous opening, the chant is
heard in C minor and the Battle Cry a tritone distant in F minor. The chant
returns in E major and then finally in a triumphal C major. The addition of
the organ to the orchestration from bar 271 to the end of the piece results in
a swelling of tone volume, and its church associations emphasise the victory
of Christianity.
After the completion of this work, Liszt did not return to the genre
of the symphonic poem until 1883, when he dedicated Von der Wiege bis
zum Grabe to Count Mihály Zichy, an Hungarian artist who had made two
drawings with this same title. The symphonic poem is divided into three
216 Reeves Shulstad
parts: ‘Die Wiege’, ‘Der Kampf um’s Dasein’ and ‘Zum Grabe, die Wiege
des Zukünftigen Lebens’;27 it bears all the characteristics of Liszt’s spare
and concentrated late style. As in the Faust Symphony, the final part (‘To
the grave’) is a radically varied transformation of the first (‘The cradle’) –
appropriately enough for a depiction of the ‘cradle of the life to come’.
Symphonies: Faust and Dante

Hector Berlioz, the eventual dedicatee of Liszt’s Faust Symphony, introduced
Liszt to Goethe’s Faust in the 1830s.28 Even though Liszt sketched parts
of the Faust Symphony during the 1840s, the main composition of the
work took place within the span of two months, August through October
1854.29 During this time, George Henry Lewes and George Eliot were visiting
Liszt and Carolyne. Lewes was working on his Life and Works of Goethe,
and the two couples engaged in frequent discussions of Goethe’s life and
works. Once again the celebration of Weimar’s classic past inspired Liszt’s
music.
Liszt referred to the Faust Symphony as consisting of three charac-
ter sketches, Faust, Gretchen and Mephistopheles. The first movement of
the Symphony, ‘Faust’, bears striking resemblances to aspects of Tasso and
Prometheus, particularly in terms of mood and key relationships, although
‘Faust’ is undoubtedly more complex and ambitious. The movement is a
sonata form in C minor, which key is established by the agitato principal
material beginning in bar 71.30 The tonal centre of the secondary mate-
rial (see bars 179–201), marked Affettuoso poco Andante, is E major. This
section is also marked by a striking orchestral change and predominantly
features the clarinets, bassoons, and horns. After a 22-bar interruption by
the principal agitato theme (marked Allegro con fuoco in bar 202), a brassy,
grandioso closing theme is firmly grounded in E major. The distant rela-
tionship between a minor tonic and its raised major third has already been
mentioned as typical for Liszt.
The opening motives of the introduction of Faust, like those in Tasso, are
differentiated by range and instrumentation and are used as the basis for
thematic material throughout not only the first movement but the entire
symphony. Devoid of a tonal centre, the radical first motive in the strings
arpeggiates descending augmented triads and uses all twelve pitches of the
chromatic scale. A solo oboe responds to the wandering arpeggios with a
dolente sigh motive ending in another tonally ambiguous augmented triad
(see Example 10.2). The first motive is immediately reinterpreted in the
Allegro impetuoso section, surrounded by string tremolos and high-pitched,
sustained woodwinds and horns. This section ends abruptly and is followed
by a long pause. The second motive then reappears in a recitative-like pas-

sage on the bassoon marked Lento assai. Much has been written about these
opening motives of the Faust Symphony.31 Whether Motive 2 is described
as illustrating Faust’s emotionalism or his contemplativeness is perhaps
inconsequential. What is more relevant for this discussion is that the binary
opposition between the motives was obviously intended by Liszt to paral-
lel two characteristic traits of Goethe’s Faust. The appearance of thematic
material from the first movement in the second and third movements reveals
those elements of Faust’s character that are associated with his relations with
Gretchen and Mephistopheles. The first seventy bars of the first movement
can therefore serve as an introduction not only to this movement but to the
symphony as a whole.
The secondary theme of the Allegro section of Faust, which is an expan-
sion of Motive 2, makes an appearance in bars 44 through 51 of the ‘Gretchen’
movement. Eventually this is supplanted by another ‘Faust’ theme, marked
patetico (bars 111–87). In ‘Liszt, Goethe, and the Discourse of Gender’
in Music as Cultural Practice, 1800–1900, Lawrence Kramer interprets
Gretchen’s music as attracting Faust’s music, but later he acknowledges:
‘What we have been calling Gretchen’s music is really Faust’s.’32 We might,
in this vein, regard the entire second movement as representing Gretchen
from the perspective of Faust, and consequently the listener really learns
more about Faust than about the complex, individual woman presented
in Goethe’s drama. The Gretchen of Liszt’s symphony – the innocent,
one-dimensional woman – exists only in Faust’s imagination. The listener
becomes aware of the masquerade when the ‘Gretchen’ mask Faust is wear-
ing slips with the appearance of the Faustian themes in bars 44 through to
51 and bar 111 to the end of the piece.
Mephistopheles can also be interpreted as an abstraction, a projection
of the destructive components of Faust’s character. In the symphony, Faust
mocks his own humanity by taking on the identity of Mephistopheles, and
in consequence little of the thematic material is new in the ‘Mephistophe-
les’ movement but is mostly derived from the first two movements. As in
Goethe’s drama, Mephistopheles is the spirit of negation, constantly belit-
tling and provoking Faust,33 so within this movement previous thematic
material is caricatured. The Gretchen theme that reappears in this move-
ment is, however, immune to distortion.
There are two versions of the Faust Symphony that merit rather different
interpretations. Liszt’s original version of 1854 ended with a last fleeting
reference to Gretchen and an optimistic orchestral peroration in C major,
based on the most majestic of the themes from the first movement. One
might say that this conclusion remains within the persona of Faust and his
imagination. In rethinking the piece, Liszt added a choral finale in 1857, a
Example 10.2 Faust, Movement 1, bars 1–5
dolente
Ob.
Cl. in C
dolente
Bssn
Vn I
Vn II
Vla
Vc.
setting of the last eight lines of Goethe’s Faust, Part 2, the ‘Chorus Mysticus’.
Ending the symphony with a chorus intoning Goethe’s closing verse makes
the symphony a closer dramatic parallel to the play. The ‘Chorus Mysticus’
signifies the end of Faust’s earthly striving, so masterfully portrayed in the
first movement, and appropriately enough it is to a solo tenor and a male
chorus that Liszt gives the last eight lines of the drama:
All that is transient

Is but an image;
The unattainable
Here becomes actual,
The indescribable
Here is accomplished.
Woman Eternal
Leads us onward.34
The text ‘Das Ewig-Weibliche’, scored for solo tenor, is set to a fragment
of Gretchen’s theme. The Faust thematic material has mostly disappeared.
With the addition of the ‘Chorus Mysticus’ text, the Gretchen theme has
been transformed, and she no longer appears as a masked Faust. With the
direct association to the last scene of the drama we have escaped Faust’s
imaginings and are hearing another voice commenting on his striving and
redemption.
Although the completion of the Dante Symphony took place after that
of Faust, Liszt had long nurtured ideas of setting Dante’s Divine Comedy to
music, and had initially intended starting with the latter symphony. In an
entry in his ‘Journal des Zÿi’ dated February 1839, Liszt wrote: ‘If I feel within
me the strength and life, I will attempt a symphonic composition based on
[Dante’s Divine Comedy], then another on Faust – within three years –
meanwhile I will make three sketches: the Triumph of Death (Orcagna), the
Comedy of Death (Holbein), and a Fragment dantesque.’35 Later that year, in
a letter to Berlioz from San Rossore in October 1839, Liszt commented on
this same topic:
Dante has found his pictorial expression in Orcagna and Michelangelo, and
someday perhaps he will find his musical expression in the Beethoven of the
future.36
The Fragment dantesque eventually became the piano piece Après une lec-
ture de Dante, fantasia quasi sonata, the seventh piece of Années de pèlerinage,
deuxième année: Italie (1839–49), and Eine Symphonie zu Dantes Divina
Commedia was finished in 1856. In the light of Liszt’s remarks to Berlioz, it
is probable that Liszt believed that the ‘Beethoven of the future’ might be
none other than himself.
220 Reeves Shulstad
Although Liszt played fragments of the Dante Symphony for Carolyne zu

Sayn-Wittgenstein during his visit to Woronince in 1847, he did not finish
it until 1856.37 Liszt had previously written to Wagner, to whom the work
is dedicated, explaining his intentions concerning the project:
Then you are reading Dante? He is excellent company for you. I, on my part,
shall furnish a kind of commentary to his work. For a long time I had in my
head a Dante symphony, and in the course of this year it is to be finished.
There are to be three movements, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, the first
purely instrumental, the last with chorus. When I visit you in autumn, I
shall probably be able to bring it with me; and if you do not dislike it, you
must allow me to inscribe it with your name.38
Wagner’s reply on 7 June 1855 was broadly encouraging, but expressed

doubts as to whether anyone could ever adequately depict paradise in music.
Liszt took this comment to heart, for the idea of a ‘Paradiso’ movement was
abandoned, and, as eventually published, the symphony consisted of two
movements, ‘Inferno’ and ‘Purgatorio’, with a choral setting of the Magnifi-
cat added to the end of the latter (bars 314–431). Like Hamlet, this symphony
depicts specific scenes from a literary work. The first movement, ‘Inferno’,
is the larger by far (646 bars). Its vivid illustration of the torments of hell
and the equally direct portrayal of the contrasting ‘Francesca da Rimini’
episode (a love element particularly attractive to nineteenth-century sen-
sibility) reveal Liszt’s affiliation with the Romantic conception of Dante.
The beginning of the movement represents the passing of Dante and Vir-
gil through the gate into hell. Similar to the poetry inserts in Die Ideale,
a modified version of Dante’s four-line inscription on the gate into hell
appears in the score in the introduction (bars 1–17). The first three text
lines are written over a very chromatic, rhythmically varied unison melody
played by the low brass and strings. The last line of the inscription, ‘Lasciate
ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate!’ (Abandon all hope, those who enter here!),
is printed over a recitation tone in the horns and trumpets, as if it could be
sung. The dramatic meaning of these motives is directly connected to the
text throughout the movement. The ‘Lasciate’ motive in particular returns
several times, serving as bridge material between the main sections, and as
the final exclamation of the coda.
The next part of the movement (bars 18–63) is not attached to any poetic
text but nevertheless involves three highly descriptive motivic ideas. The
chromatically rising triplet figure beginning in bar 18, marked tempestoso,
evokes the storm Dante and Virgil encounter in Canto 5.39 The descending
chromatic line beginning in bar 22 is a rather obvious allusion to Dante and
Virgil’s descent through the circles of hell. This descent motive is followed by
an agitated figure, marked Violente, which rises in pitch to the opposite end
of the orchestra and closes with frantic repetitions (bars 28–9). The principal
material in D minor (bars 64–102), marked Allegro frenetico, is an expanded
version of the Violente motive and maintains the frenzied character of its
progenitor. Another similarly whirlwind-like passage is presented at the
Presto molto (103–30), but after a variation of the principal theme, striking
new material is introduced (bars 163–209). This opens with a leap of a fifth
and is presented in the unrelated keys of B major and then C major before
the ‘Lasciate’ motive is repeated over a dirge-like pattern in the timpani
(bars 260–79).
Liszt now suddenly transfigures the mood of the music. Transformed
‘storm’ material from the Presto molto now reappears yearningly in bars
280–5 (Quasi andante) in the strings and flutes. With the slower tempo
and a harp accompaniment, this motive now alludes to the dissipation of
the storm in the contrasting tonal area of F major. In Dante’s poem, the
hurricane in the second circle subsides so that Francesca may tell her story,
which in Liszt’s orchestral version begins with a recitativo melody played by
a solo bass clarinet (b. 286, Espressivo dolente). Following a repetition of bars
260–94, the recitativo theme reappears, this time inscribed in the score with
Francesca’s words ‘Nessun maggior dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice
nella miseria’ (There is no greater sorrow than to recall, in wretchedness,
happy times) over harp arpeggios.
The main melody of the next section, Andante amoroso (bars 354–87),
begins as an abbreviated version of the Recitativo passage and develops into a
pleading, romantic cantilena, eventually cut off by the threatening motive of
hopelessness (bars 388–92). After an extensive harp cadenza, a rhythmically
augmented version of the principal material returns. The first two bars
of the primary theme, however, are distorted here. A note in the score
instructs that ‘this entire passage is intended to be blasphemous mocking
laughter, very sharply accentuated in the two clarinets and the violas’.40 The
closest correlation to this passage in the poem would be Dante and Virgil’s
encounter with the devils in Malebolge, the fifth valley of the eighth circle
(Cantos 21–2). The circle contains ten different types of deceit, the fifth
valley housing barratry, the (now admittedly rather dated) buying or selling
of ecclesiastical or civil advancement. Black devils hurl the over-ambitious
sinners into a pool of black pitch and make blasphemous jokes.
This developmental section leads to the recapitulation of the Più mosso
passage first heard in bars 87–162 (bars 465–540). At bar 541 the new mate-
rial of bars 163 through 209 that appeared in B major is expected, but is
instead replaced by a reiteration of the descent motive. It is not until bar
571 that the strident new theme is recapitulated in the tonic key, D minor,
and even then it is only heard once. The descent motive takes over again,
leading to one more thrust of the new material into G minor, followed by the
222 Reeves Shulstad
implacable reiteration of ‘Lasciate ogni speranza’ to bring the movement to

a merciless end.
The second half of the symphony, ‘Purgatorio’, which has as its conclu-
sion a choral setting of the Magnificat, primarily manifests the liturgical
atmosphere of Dante’s Purgatorio. Unlike the first movement, which con-
tains numerous descriptive passages, only the opening Andante section, also
marked Tranquillo (bars 1–27), functions as descriptive music. This D major
passage is of a particularly limpid beauty, with horn calls floating over an
undulating figure in the strings. It would seem to reflect the hope that is
present throughout this book, which abounds in idyllic pastoral settings,
such as the Meadow of Princes, which Dante encounters in Ante-purgatory,
and the garden of Earthly Paradise, where he arrives before meeting Beatrice.
From bar 61 onwards the movement takes on a more liturgical aspect, as a
recitative passage played by a solo violin is followed by an extended chorale.
A fugue in B minor interrupts these responsorial sections (bars 129–
231). Marked Lamentoso, it is a symbol of endurance similar to the fugue
in Prometheus. In this case, one must endure the trials of purgatory to gain
the humility needed to ascend to Paradise, which is glimpsed from afar as
a choir of boys’ voices sing the Magnificat (bar 314 ff.). The words of the
Magnificat, a canticle sung at vespers, were supposedly originally spoken
by Mary the mother of Christ, who in the Divine Comedy is humanity’s
advocate in heaven and the facilitator of Dante’s journey to Beatrice (see
Inferno, Canto 2: 94–6). The main tonal area of the Magnificat, B major, can
be connected to the B-major material in the first movement as well as the F
major tonal area of the Francesca episode. It is significant that the Magnificat
does not in any way describe God or paradise. Following Wagner’s advice,
Liszt chose to end the symphony in a mood of pensive anticipation and
avoided portraying the bliss of heaven itself. He did, however, provide two
alternative endings, one quietly rapt (and admired by Wagner) and the other
loudly grandiose (favoured by the Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein but deplored
by Wagner). The former is surely the more successful, and shares the mystical
atmosphere of the conclusion of Orpheus, the most delicately shaded of all
the symphonic poems. Despite Liszt’s fondness for stirringly clangorous
orchestral apotheoses, he was often at his best when aiming for a subtle
restraint.
11 Liszt’s sacred choral music
d o l o re s p e s ce
It is a well-known fact that Liszt took minor orders in 1865, caricatured

as the 50-some-year-old composer conducting with flailing arms in a black
cassock. The promulgated viewpoint depicts him changing from the worldly
piano virtuoso, to Wagner-championing conductor, to seemingly humble
abbé, yet still seeking public approbation. His spirituality is called into ques-
tion. What this chapter attempts to elucidate is the sincerity and coherence
of Liszt’s religious views as seen through his sacred choral music which
he began composing as early as 1842 and continued composing until a
year before his death in 1886.1 It divides his sacred choral works into two
periods: 1842–59, that is, through his early years and Weimar appointment;
and 1860–86, from when he was preparing to leave Weimar for Rome until
his death. This chronological overview discusses a given work in relation-
ship to its date of conception, allowing that its composition and revision
may have gone on for years and even decades.2
Before turning to Liszt’s works of the 1840s and 50s, we examine Liszt’s
previous attitudes towards the Church and its music, which were deter-
mined in large part by his exposure to the ideas of the Abbé Robert Félicité
de Lamennais. Lamennais figured prominently in the already precarious
political and religious climate of the 1830s when he urged his followers to
reject the divine right of kings and replace it with the sovereignty of the
people. According to Lamennais, the Church, led by the Papacy, should
lead its people into a new world order that would address oppression of
the poor and bring about equality and liberty. Religion and politics were
united in his philosophy, and Lamennais, in his book Paroles d’un croyant of
1834, went so far as to preach revolution within the framework of Christian-
ity. Liszt responded positively to the book, writing to Lamennais in 1834,
‘Christianity in the nineteenth century, that is to say, the whole religious and
political future of mankind, lies in you!’3 The Church, on the other hand,
did not react well to Lamennais’s ideas about revolution and condemned
his book. That notwithstanding, Lamennais continued his work, publishing
in 1840 the three-volume Esquisse d’une Philosophie. In the third volume,
devoted to art, he wrote: ‘Art then . . . in binding the laws of organism with
those of love . . . leads them to aim at the perfection of all that is loftiest in
[223] human nature’ and ‘Art therefore is an expression of God; her works are
224 Dolores Pesce
an infinite manifold reflection of Him.’4 Here we see the other side of his
philosophy: just as religion has a social dimension, art has ennobling and
spiritual aspects.
In 1834 Liszt visited Lamennais, who was then working on Esquisse d’une
Philosophie. In his article ‘De la musique religieuse’ of the same year, Liszt
seemed to echo Lamennais’s views on art: ‘Music must devote itself to the
people and to god; it must go from one to the other, to better, moralize,
and comfort man, to bless and praise God.’5 Liszt spoke of creating music
that would engage people not only with religious fervour, but also with
a political and national sentiment. He referred to the inspiration of the
Marseillaise and ‘beautiful songs of the revolution’.6 The religious–political
synthesis was to manifest itself in his piano cycle Album d’un voyageur
(1842): ‘Psaume’ and ‘Les cloches de G*****’ evoke the spiritual, while
‘Lyon’ and ‘Chapelle de Guillaume Tell’ have political connections – for
‘Lyon’, the uprising of exploited workers in that city in 1834, who had been
supported by Lamennais, and for ‘Chapelle de Guillaume Tell’, the Swiss
confederacy motto, ‘One for all, all for one.’ In contrast to the religious–
political thrust of the Album d’un voyageur, a solely spiritual focus arises in
Liszt’s piano piece Harmonies poétiques et religieuses of 1833–4 and in De
profundis: psaume instrumental for piano and orchestra of 1835, which Liszt
left unfinished. Near his death, Liszt returned to the psalm De profundis,
setting it for chorus, to be discussed below.7
In the 1840s Liszt began to write sacred choral pieces: the prayers Ave Maria
and Pater noster, a setting of a Lamartine poem entitled Hymne de l’enfant
à son réveil, five choruses on French texts by Racine and Chateaubriand, a
Mass for Male Voices, and the Sainte Cécile Légende. In the 1850s he added
two versions of Te Deum, Les béatitudes, a coronation anthem to the text of
Psalm 20, Domine salvum fac regem, three more psalm settings (13, Herr,
wie lange willst du meiner so gar vergessen?, 23, Mein Gott, der ist mein Hirt,
and 137, An den Wassern zu Babylon), the Gran Mass and an oratorio on
St Elisabeth. The works with the most direct liturgical functions are the two
masses, the psalm settings, and the Te Deum.
Liszt began his choral writing with settings of the prayers Ave Maria and
Pater noster I, composed respectively c.1842–6 and 1846. They appeared
together in 1846 as his first sacred choral publications and were reissued in
revised versions in 1853. MW V/6 contains both versions of the Ave Maria
(first for mixed chorus and organ ad lib., second for mixed chorus and
organ), but not the first Pater noster (first for male chorus, second for male
chorus and organ).8 The Ave Maria introduces important structural points
with staggered choral entrances, and clear declamation is at the forefront
of Liszt’s conception. The main motive for Ave Maria, outlining a B major
triad, is made poignant through the escape tone A, sounding as a sigh figure.
The poignancy is enhanced by the fact that the introductory five bars are
in B minor rather than major. This ambiguity of affect continues through
the piece, the motive appearing twice with a minor profile, returning to
the B major shaping only at the end. Liszt kept this basic design when he
revised Ave Maria in 1852, though he expanded it to almost twice the length.
The setting now has more animated homophony, with the result that some
phrase declamation is less clear than earlier. Liszt’s 1852 revised version
of Pater noster reveals simple homophony with the exception of one solo
phrase on et ne nos inducas in tentationem. The noteworthy feature of this
setting is how Liszt altered the traditional tune; whereas it usually moves
largely within the four notes C D E F, Liszt changed some Es to Es and
some Cs to Cs, allowing him freedom to modulate.
The Mass for Male Voices, the first of Liszt’s five Masses, was composed
c. 1846–8 and published with Ave Maria and Pater noster in 1853. Liszt then
revised the work in 1869, calling the second version the Szekszárd Mass,
because he anticipated its performance at Szekszárd, Hungary, where a new
church was being built. In fact, the church was delayed and the revised Mass’s
first performance took place in Jena in 1872. The 1869 version is the only
one performed today and will be examined here. It is scored for four-part
men’s chorus and organ.
Liszt’s first Mass is conservative in length and in its handling of the
Mass text. The Kyrie unfolds in the traditional three-part form, as does
the Agnus Dei.9 Material from the Sanctus returns in the Benedictus, as
expected, though here it is not the Hosanna melody, but instead a Sanctus
phrase. The two long movements, Gloria and Credo, are made manageable
by imposing on them a largely three-part form.
Liszt contained the length of this Mass as a whole by concentrating
on homophony and unison writing, with carefully placed excursions into
polyphony. The Credo is illustrative, with concise utterances until Liszt
reaches Crucifixus etiam pro nobis, sub Pontio Pilato passus, et sepultus est
(He was crucified for us, suffered under Pontius Pilate and was buried) at
b. 64. There, solo voices introduce a fugal passage on a motive reminiscent
of Bach with its progression of semitone upward, followed by a leap of a
diminished seventh downward. Choral declamation returns thereafter and
Liszt provides evocative word setting via an augmented triad on mortuos at
b. 113, following by a soaring line at cujus regni non erit finis (and of His
kingdom there will be no end).
The organ’s role in the Mass for Male Voices is varied, most often pro-
viding doublings or chordal accompaniment, but at other times briefly par-
ticipating in motivic exchange, such as at b. 71 of the Gloria, or providing
counterpoint, such as at b. 123 of the same movement. The tonal plan of
226 Dolores Pesce
the Mass as a whole is conservative, with the five movements ending in C G

C G C.
Another early work, sketched as early as 1844 or 1847, is Hymne de l’enfant
à son réveil (Hymn of the Child at Waking Up), on a text by Lamartine
from his poetry cycle Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, the same cycle that
inspired Liszt in 1833 to write his piano piece of that name.10 Hymne’s first
complete extant manuscript is dated 1862, but Liszt continued to revise the
work in 1865 and 1874. It is not known why Liszt originally wrote the work;
when it was ready for publication in 1874, Liszt dedicated it to the Liszt-
Gesang-Verein in Budapest, whose choir members premiered the work that
year.
The Hymne is scored for three-part women’s chorus, harmonium or
piano, and harp ad lib. Because Liszt positions the women’s voices in close
harmony within a rather static tessitura, the piece captures a sense of sweet
childlike simplicity. The musical ideas themselves are closely related: the core
pitches for verses 1 and 2 are C B A B C, for verse 3 (b. 88) A B C, and
the closing material (b. 128) A D, returning to C B A B C. Liszt had already
used in his piano music of the 1830s and 1840s a technique of modifying
a basic pitch set through chromatic alterations, what Carl Dahlhaus has
called Alternativ-Chroma.11 The technique is adapted in Hymne; whereas
the motivic ordering of the pitches stays intact in many Liszt pieces, here
only the complex of tones is retained. Liszt applies the same technique to
the secondary motive of verses 1 and 2, E F G F E, which reappears in verse
3 as G F E F G; he unifies these occurrences by giving the motive to only
one voice part in verses 1 and 2, then to a solo voice in verse 3.
Liszt began another set of pieces on French texts in the 1840s: Five Cho-
ruses on French Texts. According to The New Grove Dictionary worklist,
they were probably for a choral competition, which Liszt mentioned to
Anna Liszt in March 1846. Nos. 1 and 2 set texts by Racine, no. 4 a text by
Chateaubriand, no. 3 is untexted, and no. 5 is unattributed. Only number
2 appears in a modern edition.12
Between 1855 and 1858 Liszt composed a setting of Psalm 13,13 Herr, wie
lange willst du meiner so gar vergessen?, for soprano, mezzo, tenor, baritone
solos, mixed chorus and orchestra; between 1859 and 1863 he produced a
second version for tenor solo, mixed chorus and orchestra. The latter was
published in 1864.14 This is Liszt’s only psalm setting conceived from the
outset for voice and orchestra, its scale monumental in comparison to the
settings for voice and piano.
The piece unfolds in an overall plan following from the psalm’s division:
a tonally unstable opening devoted to the psalmist’s four-fold complaint
about his enemies, each line beginning Wie lange? (How long?); the prayer
for help, which Liszt divides into two subsections, Andante mosso in 64 at
letter G on the words Schaue doch und erhöre mich, Herr, mein Gott (Look,
answer me, O Lord, my God!), and an Allegro agitato at letter I where the
personal enemy is mentioned again; an expression of trust in God yields
an extended Moderato section from letter M through S, into which Liszt
inserts a return of Schaue doch . . . (letter Q) that is not in the psalm itself;
finally, the psalm’s vow Ich will dem Herrn singen, dass er so wohl an mir
gethan (I will sing to the Lord, because he has dealt bountifully with me) is
exuberantly vivified from letter T to the end, as Liszt weaves a rich panoply
of contrapuntal and homophonic textures.
Liszt uses thematic transformation to give the piece cohesion. The main
motive, consisting of a descending semitone followed by a descending fifth,
appears in b.1 in a Maestoso unison, as an agitated ostinato at letter I, a sweet
lyric at letter M, a triumphant Marziale at letter T, immediately becoming
the head motive of a Marcato fugue at U, which in turn is transformed into
a graceful theme at 4 after Z.15 This is Liszt’s writing at its best, using solo,
chorus, and orchestra to create the same sort of affective array that one finds
in his B Minor Sonata.
Liszt next set Psalm 23, in a German paraphrase by Herder, Mein Gott, der
ist mein Hirt (The Lord is my shepherd). He composed a version for tenor
or soprano solo and male chorus c. 1859–61, publishing it in 1864 without
chorus.16 For the accompaniment, Liszt allowed several possibilities: harp
and organ or harmonium, piano and harmonium, or just piano. In all three
cases, the instrument(s) provide an atmospheric background to the sus-
tained line of the lyrical solo voice. The piece sounds sectionalised because
Liszt puts a fermata at section ends and changes the accompanimental figure
at section beginnings, increasing the rhythmic activity until the return of
Mein Gott, der ist mein Hirt, which forms a frame to the piece as a whole.
The only major deviation from this plan occurs at the paraphrase of the
words ‘Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I
fear no evil’ (see b. 134–65), where a recitative-like texture emerges. Two
unification devices are noteworthy: a melodic interval of a third and an
augmented sixth chord that first appears in b. 14 and reappears throughout
the framing sections.
In a letter of 1862, Liszt mentioned changes to his setting of Psalm
137, An den Wassern zu Babylon, which he had begun in 1859 at the same
time as Psalm 23. He published both in 1864. His setting of Psalm 137 is
for solo voice, women’s chorus, solo violin, harp or piano, and organ or
harmonium. Whereas Psalm 23 has a peaceful topos, Psalm 137 has one of
lament, capturing that affect in a quasi-Baroque operatic manner. He opens
the piece with unison fragments from the Hungarian scale on C, with its
two inherent augmented seconds.17 While this lamentary motivic approach
is carried into the vocal line, the line at times also assumes an operatic sweep
228 Dolores Pesce
that is equally expressive. Perhaps most surprising to a listener today is the

setting of the captors’ words Des Zion’s Lieder singet uns doch eins! (Sing for
us the songs of Sion!) The unaccompanied utterance is indicated mit frem-
dartiger Betonung, then bitter, für sich hinstarrend, to which the obbligato
violin responds sehr düster und ausdrucksvoll and weinend, leading back to
the words of the captive Jews. Their personification, the solo voice, responds
in fragments underscored by a tremolo diminished seventh chord in harp
and piano. A small melodrama has unfolded. It continues as the captors,
sung for the first time by the women’s chorus, utter the word Jerusalem in a
clear hopeful C major. Although the solo voice inserts two further laments,
the stability of the choral utterances perseveres. In the final two phrases,
the first a cappella, the second accompanied, Liszt inserts C into his rising
motive (B C D E). That tone is a reminder of modulations to the key of D
earlier in the piece, but its yearning inflection upward also leaves us with a
lingering sense of the Jews’ struggles.18
The 1850s yielded a few short pieces: Te Deum I and Domine salvum fac
regem of 1853 and Te Deum II of 1859.19 Te Deum I for mixed chorus, organ,
brass, and percussion ad lib. presents a unison chant with changing metres
to fit the declamation. Only the middle section involves vocal harmony,
but here and throughout the piece, Liszt retains a modal flavour that is not
regularly encroached upon by leading tones. When Liszt wrote Te Deum II
in 1859, he enlarged the harmonic palette, harmonising line endings with
a variety of cadence types in a wider variety of keys. This version is for
men’s chorus and organ only. Liszt wrote Domine salvum fac regem for a
ceremony held in Weimar in 1853 to mark the accession of Carl Alexander
as Grand Duke. Liszt’s setting for men’s chorus, tenor solo, and organ has
outer sections that suggest a coronation anthem, with the organ providing a
trumpet-like fanfare. The middle section highlights the tenor solo in soaring
lines on et exaudi nos in die qua invocaverimus (and hear us on the day we
shall call upon Thee).20
Liszt’s setting of Les béatitudes (Die Seligkeiten), composed 1855–9, is for
mixed chorus, baritone solo, and organ. The piece unfolds as a sort of litany,
with each full invocation stated first by the soloist, then by the chorus either
in unison or in harmony. At letter H, the discourse becomes more interac-
tive as solo and chorus alternate short utterances on Glückselig (Blessed),
after which they join together at times. This almost totally syllabic setting is
unified by a motive that consists of descending minor third, ascending per-
fect fourth, descending major second. The highly affective quality of the
piece arises in part from the pause after each invocation and in part
from the overarching line moving slowly from B chromatically upwards
to E.
Liszt wrote a second Mass, his Missa solemnis zur Erweihung der Basilika
in Gran (Gran Mass), in 1855–8, which is scored for soprano, alto, tenor,
and bass solos, mixed chorus and orchestra. Liszt had apparently promised
Bishop János Scitovsky of Fünfkirchen to write the Mass as early as 1846, but
the work only came to fruition when Scitovsky, now Archbishop, renewed
the commission in 1855; the Mass had its first performance in Esztergom
(Gran) for the reconsecration of its cathedral in 1856. Liszt continued to
revise the work after the first performance and published it in 1859.
In practically every respect, the Gran Mass reveals a Mass conception that
has changed since Liszt embarked on the Mass for Male Voices. While the
organ played a somewhat limited role in the earlier Mass, the orchestra in the
Gran Mass is essential. At times it has a primary responsibility for creating a
particular atmosphere, e.g. in the Sanctus at b. 6 via a triumphant fanfare,
and at b. 15 via repeated notes in the strings played pp and misterioso. In the
two longer movements, the Gloria and Credo, the orchestra often animates
the texture, but may make a fugal entry (Gloria, cum sancto spiritu section)
or carry the main motive (Credo, B major credo unam ecclesiam section). In
varying his forces, Liszt puts solos in every movement and pits the solo(s)
against chorus in the first Kyrie and in the Sanctus. The Credo is particularly
rich in changing textures.
In comparison to the Male-Voice Mass, Liszt conceived this Mass with a
much higher degree of motivic integration within and between movements.
In the former, the ‘Gloria’ motive returns in that movement’s final two
sections, as does the ‘Credo’ motive in its final section. The Gran Mass
exhibits a more complex network of returning gestures, largely tied to its
‘Christe’ and ‘Gloria’ motives. The opening ‘Gloria’ motive, characterised
by its dotted rhythm and fanfare-like unfolding, returns to underscore the
triumphant sentiments of et resurrexit tertia die (on the third day He rose
again) in the Credo and hosanna in excelsis (hosanna in the highest) in the
Sanctus, and finally in the Agnus Dei as part of the dona nobis pacem (grant
us peace), to which I will return shortly. The ‘Christe’ motive, a poignant and
lyrical request for Christ’s mercy, returns in chromatic guise at the similar
invocation qui tollis peccata mundi miserere nobis (Thou that takest away the
sins of the world, have mercy on us) in the Gloria, in its diatonic form as the
main motive of the Benedictus, which acknowledges Christ as qui venit in
nomine Domini (He who comes in the name of the Lord), and chromatically
in the first and second Agnus, which again invoke Christ’s mercy (qui tollis
peccata mundi miserere nobis). The ‘Christe’ motive, in diatonic form, also
opens the dona nobis pacem section, to which we now turn.
In his setting of ‘Grant us peace’, ‘Kyrie’ and ‘Credo’, Liszt successively
introduces the following motives: ‘Christe’, ‘Gloria’, ‘et in terra pax’ Amen,
230 Dolores Pesce
from the Gloria, Kyrie, and Credo. The combined message is simple and
profound: Christ, the triumphant Lord, in whom Liszt believes, brings mercy
and peace to us on earth. These motives flow effectively together to end this
work about which Liszt said:
You may be sure, dear friend, that I did not compose my work as one might
put on a church vestment instead of a paletot, but that it has sprung from
the truly fervent faith of my heart, such as I have felt it since my childhood.
‘Genitum, non factum’ – and therefore I can truly say that my Mass has been
more prayed than composed. (L I, 292)21
With respect to internal unification, the Credo can be singled out for
Liszt’s use of thematic transformation of the opening orchestral motive.22
The Credo is also notable for its rich rhythmic palette. Liszt underscores the
very affective et homo factus est (and was made man) section with an insistent
syncopated pattern that builds to a climax at crucifixus etiam pro nobis sub
Pontio Pilato passus, et sepultus est. For judicare vivos et mortuos (to judge
the living and the dead) a repeated-note fanfare sounds, to return again at
the complementary words et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum (and I look
for the resurrection of the dead).
Finally, the Gran Mass shows a similar harmonic vocabulary to the Male-
Voice Mass on the local level – third relationships between chords are com-
mon. Its overall key scheme from movement to movement, D B C G D, is
less homogeneous.23
Liszt conceived the idea of a piece to St Cecilia in this first period, but
the early version does not survive; he returned to the concept in 1874 and
published his Die heilige Cäcilia Legende (Sainte Cécile) in 1876.24 Its text is
a twelve-stanza poem to St Cecilia by Madame Emilie de Girardin (1804–
55); the poem describes how Cecilia worshipped God through song, how
she was martyred, and how subsequently she has been celebrated in winter
concerts, but also through Raphael’s portrait of her. Liszt focuses on the
power of song by setting the poem primarily for mezzo-soprano solo, who
sings verses 1–9 a cappella or with minimal accompaniment.25 When verse
10 begins Tous les arts lui rendent hommage (All of the arts pay her homage),
the full orchestra effectively joins in, and in the middle of verse 11 the cho-
rus enters for the first time, highlighting Sainte Cécile in unison. The soloist
returns for the final verse, which ends in an ethereal ascending line.26 The
main unifying motive of the piece is taken from Antiphon 1 for the feast of
St Cecilia. A consistent lyricism and a homogeneous triadic language dom-
inate the Legende, with the exception of verses 5–6 where Liszt uses short
gasping phrases and diminished seventh chords to underscore the drama of
Cecilia’s martyrdom. If the piece has a weakness, it would be its preponder-
ance of consecutive third relationships. Some passages project a nebulous
harmonic mixture of the major and its relative minor (E/c at Sur sa tête il
suspend le glaive and E/c for Et tous les ans dans cette enceinte).
Liszt set a second legend, Die Legende von der heiligen Elisabeth, between
1857 and 1862, overlapping the end of his employment in Weimar and his
move to Rome.27 Liszt subtitled it Oratorium, and thus arose the first of
his two oratorios. He stated that the main impetus came from the fres-
coes painted in 1855 by Moritz von Schwind depicting the life of St Elisa-
beth of Hungary.28 Otto Roquette, a well-known writer and poet, prepared
the libretto at Liszt’s direction; both knew Montalembert’s Vie de Sainte
Elisabeth: Sancta Elisabeth Hungarica, patrona pauperum, which empha-
sised her devotion to the poor.29 The turning point of Elisabeth’s legend
occurs when she is covertly carrying food to the poor, is confronted by
her husband, and, opening her cape, finds it filled with exquisite roses.
This ‘miracle of roses’ results in her husband’s decision to follow another
God-given cause, the Crusades. Thus, in one work, Liszt highlighted sev-
eral of his own concerns: social justice through religion and his Hungarian
heritage.
The oratorio is divided into two parts, each with three sections. As in the
St Cecilia Legend, Liszt employs melodic motives relevant to the saint’s feast
day: the opening of the fifth antiphon for the feast of St Elisabeth is the main
unifying ‘Elisabeth’ motive, and a Hungarian folk hymn to Elisabeth appears
in the ‘Chorus of the Poor’.30 The Hungarian side is further emphasized
by Liszt’s use of a lively folk tune as the Hungarian Princess Elisabeth is
introduced to her new people through marriage, the people of Wartburg.31
In the ‘March of the Crusaders’, Liszt introduces an old pilgrim song from
the Middle Ages, ‘Schönster Herr Jesu’, which is performed in a devout, quiet
manner.32 He further emphasises the religious essence of those historical
events by integrating into ‘The Chorus of Crusaders’ and the ‘March of the
Crusaders’ what he called the ‘Cross’ motive (G A C).33
In some ways, the St Elisabeth oratorio fits squarely into Liszt’s con-
ception of sacred music in the 1850s, particularly his attention to clear
choral declamation and use of orchestral colouring. But the work diverges
in two related ways: its extensive dramatic content and its operatic vocal
writing. Certainly Liszt highlighted obvious dramatic moments in his Mass
and Psalm texts, but in the St Elisabeth oratorio, the actual flow of music
in some sections takes on the rapidly changing emotional inflections of its
characters, perhaps best illustrated in section 4 when Elisabeth’s mother-
in-law Sophie coldly bans Elisabeth from the kingdom after learning that
her son was killed in the Crusades; Elisabeth responds with pleas for mercy
and Sophie counters with power-grasping, imperious resolve. The recit-like
declamation, harmonic language, and orchestral interjections aptly drama-
tise the characters’ conflicting emotions. Moreover, Elisabeth’s several arias
232 Dolores Pesce
and the duet for her and her husband in the ‘Miracle of the Roses’ present
exquisite examples of Liszt’s ability to write in an operatic idiom, despite
the fact that he never completed an opera. Liszt refused to put on a staged
performance, despite urgings from various quarters, because of the work’s
central sacred message. In any case, the St Elisabeth oratorio was performed
more often and better received than any other work in Liszt’s lifetime.
A final point concerns the vital importance of choruses and orchestral
preludes/interludes. There is a major chorus in each of the work’s six scenes,
except the second, which is dominated by the interaction of Elisabeth and
her husband. These choruses evoke an appropriate atmosphere and intro-
duce some of the major motives mentioned above. Whereas the opening
orchestral introduction is rather brief, Liszt prefaces the final scene with a
full-fledged orchestral piece that brings together the main musical motives
much as an opera overture would, but also includes a triumphant thematic
transformation of Elisabeth’s signature motive. This orchestral ‘interlude’
thus reveals Liszt’s fusion of an opera overture and the technique he devel-
oped in his symphonic programme music.34
Whereas the period 1842–59 yielded some fifteen sacred works, Liszt con-
ceived an even greater number between 1860 and 1886: three Masses (Missa
choralis, Ungarische Kronungsmesse, and a Requiem), one oratorio (Chris-
tus), three psalm settings (Psalm 18 (19), Psalm 116 (117), and 129 (130)),
plus two German pieces that include psalm texts, and settings of Via cru-
cis, Septem sacramenta and Rosario. St Francis of Paula, Liszt’s name saint,
figures in An den heiligen Franziskus von Paula and St Francis of Assisi in
Mihi autem adhaerere and Cantico del Sol di San Francesco. Liszt turned to
St Cecilia again in 1879 with Cantantibus organis. Antiphone zum Feste der
hl. Cäcilie, and to St Christopher in his Sankt Christoph legend of 1881,
still unpublished (scored for female voices, piano, harmonium, and harp
ad lib.). Liszt also composed some twenty-nine shorter choral pieces.
Responsorien und Antiphonen for men’s chorus and organ ad lib. of 1860
begins our discussion of this period when Liszt was about to move to Rome,
prepare for and take minor orders in the Church. In this work, Liszt provides
harmonised plainchant settings for five occasions including Christmas and
the Office of the Dead. Liszt had been interested in reforming church music
since his earlier involvement with Lamennais, but his interest in doing so
was renewed in Rome. On 24 July 1860 he wrote to Princess Carolyne asking
her to send to him a copy of an 1839 report by Spontini to Pope Gregory
XVI in which Spontini had begun discussing how to clean up church music,
particularly by ridding it of operatic influences. Liszt also mentioned that he
himself was conceiving something to send to the Pope, namely plainchant
settings that could be universally adopted in church use (BR V, 34–5).35 Only
the Responsorien und Antiphonen of 1860 survive, perhaps intended as part

of his larger liturgical concept; they were not published until 1936.36
Responsorien und Antiphonen are homophonic settings, including judi-
cious use of some chromatic harmony. Like some other church music
reformers in the 1850s and 1860s, Liszt generally stayed with the nineteenth-
century tradition of harmonising chants rather than returning to their
proper monophonic performance. All chords are written in whole notes
with no bar lines imposed.37
Despite Liszt’s plan for reforming plainchant settings, he did not intensify
his reliance on plainchant in his sacred works from 1860 on. In the first
period, he had used plainchant in his Pater noster I, his Mass for Male
Voices, his two Te Deum settings, and in the St Cecilia and St Elisabeth
Legends. In this second period with its greater number of sacred works
overall, he uses plainchant only in the Missa choralis, the Coronation Mass,
the oratorio Christus, and in Via Crucis. The earlier Pater noster and Te
Deum are harmonised or unison settings of the entire plainchants. But
in other pieces Liszt tends to present an unaccompanied chant intonation,
after which the reference to chant ceases or the motive may become the basis
for the movement’s compositional unfolding. In Christus and the legends,
some of the plainchant borrowings are not even initially highlighted by
solo or unison performance, but are integrated into the prevailing texture.
In short, Liszt’s treatment of chant within many of his sacred compositions
does not follow the simple and overt harmonisation method he propounded
in Responsorien und Antiphonen; Liszt was interested in bringing a chant’s
historical and liturgical essence into his works without necessarily invoking
its associated performance modes.
In 1860, the same year he wrote Responsorien und Antiphonen, Liszt set
in German Psalm 18 (19), Die Himmel erzählen die ehre Gottes, for men’s
chorus. He published it in 1871, allowing varying accompaniments: full
orchestra and organ ad lib., organ alone, brass and wind instruments with
percussion ad lib.38 The choral writing in this psalm of praise is largely
homophonic or unison, with only limited imitative passages. The work’s
three strophes share the same melodic material.
Two other German works use psalm texts: Gott sei uns gnaedig meine
Seel’ erhebt den Herrn! (Psalm 67) from 1878 (for mixed chorus and organ,
unpublished) which asks God to continue His blessings on His people;
and Der Herr bewahret die Seelen seiner Heiligen (Psalm 97:10–12), which
expresses confidence in the Lord’s justice. The latter was composed as the
festival song for the unveiling of the Carl August Monument in Weimar on
3 September 1875.39 Scored for mixed chorus, brass, timpani, and organ,
the work features the voices in thirds on a descending motive; each time the
motive appears it descends from a higher starting pitch than previously. Of
234 Dolores Pesce
the two published endings, the second is more effective with its third-related
altered harmonies at preiset that relieve the diatonic sameness.
Liszt composed a Latin setting of Psalm 116 (117), Laudate Dominum, in
186940 and published this psalm the same year, the score allowing for men’s
or mixed chorus with piano or orchestral accompaniment. Liszt incorpo-
rated the orchestral version into his Coronation Mass two years after the
latter work’s premiere in 1867. The version with piano is examined here. As
in the other psalm of praise that Liszt set, Psalm 18 (19), the vocal setting of
116 (117) is entirely homophonic or in unison, proclaiming its textual mes-
sage without textural complications. The voices deviate from their forceful
utterances only at the words misericordia ejus (His mercy), where suspen-
sions restrain the drive forward. The piano part, with its ascending scalar
passages, syncopated chordal punctuation, and tremolandos, increases the
rhythmic vitality of the psalm setting.
When Liszt wrote his Testament in 1860, he mentioned An den heiligen
Franziskus von Paula as one of his works in manuscript, so presumably it had
been finished in some form by then (BR, V, 61); it was not published until
1875. Liszt called it a ‘prayer’ for men’s voices – soloists and chorus, with
harmonium or organ and three trombones and timpani ad lib. In addition
to its prayer-like phrases, the work evokes the tempestuous waters upon
which St Francis miraculously walked, brought to life by the men’s chorus
singing undulating agitato lines.
Liszt composed Mihi autem adhaerere in 1868 as an Offertory for the
Mass of St Francis of Assisi; it is scored for men’s chorus and organ. The
words are taken from the wisdom Psalm 73, specifically verse 28, Mihi autem
adhaerere Deo bonum est, ponere in Domino Deo spem meam (But for me
it is good to be near God, to place my hope in the Lord God). They are
set simply, but with nuanced harmony and arching melodic line to match
Liszt’s intention, particularly for the words my hope: ‘I did not want it to
be too restful, nor too agitated – simple and effusive, tender and serious,
ardent and chaste, all at the same time.’41
The other piece for St Francis of Assisi is Cantico del Sol, for baritone
solo, men’s chorus, orchestra and organ, composed in 1862 and revised
c. 1879–82. At roughly 15 minutes in length, this is Liszt’s longest work
for a solo male voice. It sets the Canticle of the Sun written by St Francis,
which praises God for each of his creations in eight successive stanzas. The
chorale theme In dulci jubilo appears in stanzas 2, 4, and 6, the other major
melodic idea beginning with an ascending perfect fourth. On one hand,
the work has an overt structure, with the stanzas progressing as a series
of variations on these two elements; on the other, the stanzas are not of
equal length and Liszt’s different ways of handling them, particularly with
respect to orchestral accompaniment, gives Cantico del Sol a more subtle
unfolding than its stanzaic background would suggest. Particularly striking
is the change to 44 time from the prevailing 34 for stanza 7’s praise of God’s
creation madre terra; in addition the accompaniment thins out following
stanza 6’s full and animated texture in praise of fire. Liszt’s writing for
baritone solo demands stamina, but never empty virtuosity.
The Missa choralis for mixed chorus and organ was composed largely in
1865.42 Liszt apparently intended to dedicate the Mass to Pope Pius IX, but it
bore no dedication when published in 1869. Liszt incorporated plainchant
in two movements: the Credo is based on a fragment that also appears
in the Male-Voice Mass,43 and the Kyrie uses an antiphon from Vespers on
Corpus Christi, whose text Sacerdos in aeternum Christus Dominus secundum
ordinem Melchisedech panem et vinum obtulit (Christ the Lord a priest for
ever in the line of Melchisedech brought bread and wine) is perhaps a
reflection on Liszt’s taking minor orders in 1865.
Unlike the Gran Mass, the Missa choralis does not reveal a high degree of
motivic unification among movements. Only at the dona nobis pacem does
an earlier motive recur, that of the Kyrie. On the other hand, the Credo is
almost dogmatic in its reuse of its opening motive throughout. The Mass’s
most compelling musical feature is its effective array of textures. Whereas
the Credo has a significant portion of unison writing, the Kyrie, Gloria, and
Sanctus have a number of passages with quick, staggered entrances. The
Benedictus puts each voice in dialogue with the other three who respond
homophonically, while in the Agnus Dei each voice is given miserere in
turn, but now answered by the other voices in contrapuntal interaction.
The Christe has an extended hocket on eleison which also ends the final
Kyrie.
The key scheme of the Missa choralis is d-D G D BD, which is similar
to that of the Gran Mass. As he did in that Mass ten years earlier, Liszt uses
third relationships in the Missa choralis, but the overall language is relatively
diatonic. The most striking harmonic effect occurs in the Agnus Dei, whose
first two sonorities are D minor to the Neapolitan, a progression that also
sounds on the last peccata mundi; after a pause, the two tones E and G carry
over to dona nobis pacem, introducing a nebulous tonal passage before the
piece returns solidly to D.
With his Ungarische Krönungsmesse (Coronation Mass), composed in
1866–7, Liszt returned to an orchestrated setting for soprano, alto, tenor,
and bass soloists, mixed chorus, full orchestra, and organ. Its commission
was occasioned by the coronation of Francis Joseph I of Austria as King of
Hungary in 1867, an appointment Liszt coveted ‘to show myself worthy of it
as a Catholic, a Hungarian, and a composer’.44 Two years later he made some
revisions and added as the Graduale the orchestral version of his Psalm 116
(117) setting, publishing the entire work in 1869.
Apparently Liszt received instructions to write this Mass so that it
could be performed easily. Consequently, the accompaniments move
236 Dolores Pesce
predominantly in even note values and the choral writing is largely homo-
phonic with a limited number of imitative passages. The Mass’s interest lies
in its varying dispositions of solos and chorus, including their simultaneous
utterance of different texts in the Benedictus, which does not happen often
in Liszt’s sacred choral writing. The composer’s orchestration also changes
effectively both within and between movements. For example, the Sanctus
surprisingly highlights the organ when it sustains its incomplete V9 har-
mony (A C E G/B) through two bars of rest (bb. 17–18) after the orches-
tra suddenly breaks off; and during the qui tollis peccata mundi section of the
Gloria the solo voices exchange motives with the paired oboes and bassoons.
In the Benedictus Liszt offers one of his few examples of obbligato solo violin
writing.
Perhaps what distinguishes the Coronation Mass most from Liszt’s other
Masses is its heavy reliance on Hungarian musical gestures, intended, as
Liszt’s quoted words suggest, to bring his Hungarian allegiances to the fore-
front. In the Gloria the words qui tollis peccata mundi are set to a descending
fragment of the Hungarian scale, and qui sedes ad dexteram Patris (Thou
that sittest at the right hand of the Father) adapts a fragment of the Rákóczy
March. Liszt characterised the instrumental Offertory as a sort of Magyar
hymn;45 its cantabile expressiveness changes to a forceful declaration by the
movement’s end. And the obbligato violin melody of the Benedictus uses
the repeated appoggiatura figures typical of the verbunkos dance, but that
also appear in the Rákóczy March.
Whereas a number of the larger sacred works to date had revealed an
operatic strain in their vocal writing, Liszt infused the vocal solos of his
Coronation Mass with a lyrical simplicity. Because of this quality, he was
able to incorporate into the Mass a Credo from the seventeenth-century
composer Henri Dumont, largely a unison plainchant setting, without any
jarring stylistic incongruity.46 The cyclic element of the Coronation Mass is
focused on the return of the qui tollis peccata mundi music from the Gloria
in the first two statements of the Agnus Dei, followed by a closing Tempo del
Kyrie which is reminiscent of the Christe with its successive appoggiatura
figures.
As part of Liszt’s desire that the work be easy to perform, he limited its
harmonic complexities.47 The Gloria, Graduale, and Agnus Dei reveal fairly
typical Lisztian writing in which an upper voice gradually traces a chromatic
line to a climax or nadir. The key scheme of the movements unfolds EC C
d E E A E.
On the heels of composing the Coronation Mass, Liszt wrote a Requiem
(1867–8) for two tenor and two bass soloists, men’s chorus, organ, and brass
ad lib. The motivation for the Requiem’s composition remains uncertain,
with theories pointing to the recently executed Emperor Maximilian, Liszt’s
recently deceased mother and children, and anticipation of his own funeral.
In any case, Liszt expressed his feeling that composers had generally ‘colored
the Requiem black, quite unrelentingly black’, whereas he ‘tried to give to
the feeling of death a character of sweet Christian hope’.48 Liszt’s claim is
not entirely borne out in a hearing of the Requiem, since its predominant
harmonic language is highly chromatic, lending it a discomforting tone.
The tension is relieved periodically: in the Kyrie that ends the Requiem
aeternam, in the Andante maestoso section of the Offertorium, in the hosanna
sections of the Sanctus and Benedictus, and at the end of the Agnus Dei. Liszt
originally concluded the Requiem at this point, but then added Libera me in
1872. The latter is very different from the rest because of its more animated
rhythmic quality, involving the organ in a driving accompanimental figure
that sounds as late as twelve bars from the end. Furthermore, Liszt does
not end Libera me with its usual ‘Grant eternal rest to them, O Lord, and
let perpetual light shine upon them’, but rather he returns to its opening
lines, ‘Deliver me, O Lord, from death eternal, on that dreadful day, when
the heavens and the earth shall quake, when Thou shalt come to judge the
world by fire.’49 In view of this call for deliverance and the driving movement
that accompanies it, the concluding organ plagal cadence is far from settling.
This Libera me conclusion notwithstanding, the general mood of Liszt’s
Requiem is more restrained than those by Mozart, Cherubini, Berlioz, and
Verdi, which Liszt knew (BR, VII, 177, 293). Liszt uses the brass and timpani
only in the hosanna sections of the Sanctus and Benedictus and in three
related spots in the Dies irae: at Tuba mirum spargens sonum, Judex ergo cum
sedebit, and judicandus homo reus, the first in response to its imagery of the
trumpet, and the latter two dealing with the Last Judgement. The Dies irae
is unified by a motive of a semitone up, diminished third down (G A F),
necessary in view of the inordinate length of the Dies irae, which lasts 16
minutes versus the 5–9 minutes of the other five movements.
The chromatic language of the Requiem has already been mentioned.
Liszt uses augmented triads judiciously for selected words with rhetori-
cal impact.50 His most dissonant sonority falls within the Dies irae in the
Recordare section at ne me perdas (do not forsake me): E sounds simultane-
ously with E in the outer voices.51 Also noteworthy in the Offertorium is the
setting of Hostias et preces, tibi, Domine, laudis offerimus (O Lord, we offer
to Thee sacrifices and prayers of praise) with unclear tonal implications,
designated misterioso. Finally, the key scheme of the movements unfolds:
A C A F A A; the plan is fairly typical of Liszt’s multiple-movement works
from this time period, except for the A of the added on Libera me.
Liszt’s second oratorio, Christus, was largely composed in 1865–6,
though he continued working on it until its publication in 1872.52 One
is struck by how differently Liszt conceived this work in comparison to the
238 Dolores Pesce
St Elisabeth oratorio, despite their proximity in time. Christus unfolds in

three main parts, which Liszt labels Weihnachts-Oratorium, Nach Epiphania,
and Passion und Auferstehung. The first two parts each contain five separate
movements, while part 3 has four movements. Unlike in St Elisabeth, there
are no connecting recitatives. With a few exceptions, solo voices emerge out
of the chorus for textural contrast or in evocation of liturgical responsorial
singing. Two exceptions occur when the baritone solo ‘speaks’ as Christ:
in part II, no. 9: Quid timidi estis modicae fidei? (Why are you fearful, o
ye of little faith?) and then in part III, no. 11: Tristis est anima mea usque
ad mortem. Pater, si possibile est transeat a me calix iste, sed non quod ego
volo, sed quod tu (My soul is sorrowful even unto death. My Father, if it be
possible, let this chalice pass from me. Nevertheless, not as I will, but as
Thou wilt). Another occurs when the mezzo-soprano solo sings ‘above’ the
chorus in Part II, no. 10, ‘The Entry into Jerusalem’, much as would occur
in an operatic scene.
Christus’s subtitle, Oratorio on Texts from the Holy Scripture and the
Catholic Liturgy, helps put Liszt’s musical choices in perspective. Unlike
St Elisabeth, Christus does not unfold as a narrative per se, but instead
reminds us of significant moments in Christ’s life by allusion to certain
biblical passages or liturgical texts/melodies. Liszt himself assembled these
texts. The oratorio’s movements and their associations are as follows:
Part I. Weihnachts-Oratorium
1. Introduction Rorate coeli melody and Angelus
ad pastores melody
2. Pastorale and Angelus ad pastores text (Luke 2:
Annunciation 10–14) and melody
3. Stabat mater speciosa hymn of same name
4. Shepherd’s Song at the German tune Es flog ein Täublein
Manger weisse von Himmel an
5. The Three Holy Kings Matthew 2: 9, 11
Part II. Nach Epiphania
6. The Beatitudes Matthew 5: 3–10 and Angelus ad
pastores melody
7. Pater noster Pater noster text (Matthew 6:
9–13) and melody
8. The Foundation of the Tu es Petrus from Matthew 16:
Church 18 and John 21: 15–17
9. The Miracle Matthew 8: 24–6
10. The Entry into Jerusalem Hosanna, benedictus qui venit in
nomine Domini (Matthew
21:9) and Benedicamus
Domino melody
Part III. Passion und Auferstehung
11. Tristis est anima mea Mark 14: 34–6
12. Stabat mater dolorosa hymn of same name
13. O filii et filiae. Easter anonymous Easter hymn (text
hymn and music)
14. Resurrexit. Christus vincit Rorate coeli melody, Angelus ad
pastores melody, and Hosanna
melody from no. 10
Part I, the Christmas story, opens with a movement based on the melody
Rorate coeli, an Advent chant that gives expression to the prophet Isaiah’s
longing for the coming of the Messiah (Isaiah 45:8). Nos. 1 and 4 are solely
orchestral pieces, pastoral in character; they are separated by two largely
choral movements – no. 2 consists of the angel’s solo announcement to
the shepherds, women’s chorus responding alleluia, then full chorus; and
no. 3 a choral setting of the hymn ‘Stabat mater speciosa’, about Mary at the
manger. Whereas nos. 1–4 suggest calm joy at Christ’s birth, Part I closes
with a march (no. 5), presumably to suggest the travels of the kingly trio. But
the march-like frame of no. 5 encases two other contrasting materials, the
first of which Liszt labels with these words from Matthew 2:9: Et ecce stella,
quam viderent in Oriente, antecedebat eos, usque dum veniens, staret supra
ubi erat Puer (And lo, the star which they had seen in the East went before
them, till it came to rest over the place where the Child was). Clearly this
sustained unfolding of an arching diatonic line is meant to evoke the kings’
calm wonder at the sight of the star. And the strangely chromatic music to
which Liszt attaches Matthew 2:11, Apertis thesauris suis, obtulerunt Magi
Domino aurum, thus et mirrham (Then, opening their treasures, they offered
him gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh), suggests the gifts’ foreignness,
but without any dramatic impact. In its own way, no. 5 too captures the
simplistic calm of the Christmas story.
Part II has a more dramatic shaping, gradually building in intensity. It
opens with two prayers uttered by Christ during his Sermon on the Mount.
The Beatitudes (no. 6) involve responsorial alternation between the baritone
solo and the chorus; Pater noster (no. 7) uses sustained choral homophony,
with only a few contrasting imitative passages. Liszt originally composed the
music for no. 8 to the text Dall’ alma Roma in praise of Pius IX.53 The open-
ing text, Tu es Petrus, is boldly declaimed by men in unison, accompanied by
an orchestral tremolo on E, the fifth of an augmented triad on A. This stark
opening is followed by a lyrical setting of the words from John, Simon Joannis,
diligis me? Pasce agnos meos, pasce oves meos (Simon, son of John, lovest thou
me? Feed my lambs. Feed my sheep), and then a return to Tu es Petrus as a
triumphant major-mode proclamation. The Miracle (no. 9) clearly depicts
the passage from Matthew in which a storm overtakes the boat carry-
ing Christ and his disciples. The orchestra’s agitato chromatic oscillations
are finally overlaid with the men’s choir singing Domine, salva nos, per-
imus (Lord save us, we perish), to which Christ answers unaccompanied,
‘Why are ye fearful, o ye of little faith?’ An orchestral calm ensues, and Liszt
reintroduces the music that accompanied regnum caelorum (kingdom of
heaven) in the Beatitudes. Whereas no. 9 is a descriptive piece, no. 10, The
Entry into Jerusalem, is a ceremonial climax to Part III, its instrumentation
including even cymbals. The text unfolds with phrases beginning Hosanna
240 Dolores Pesce
and Benedictus (blessed), in most cases uttered by full chorus with full
orchestral accompaniment, suggesting the exultation at Christ’s entry into
Jerusalem. Liszt’s concession to the pictorial lies in a sort of walking bass at
the outset and again at letter Q; it captures well the idea of a jubilant entry.
Whereas the numbers within the first two parts of the oratorio were
roughly equal in length, those in Part III are strangely uneven, running
14, 40, 3, and 7 minutes respectively. The longest are Tristis est anima mea
(no. 11) and Stabat mater dolorosa (no. 12). No. 11 focuses on Christ’s
sorrow as he anticipated his death and no. 12 on his Mother’s suffering at
the foot of his cross. After the generally diatonic nature of Parts I and II,
Liszt imbues these two numbers with a highly chromatic language to capture
Christ’s and his Mother’s anguish. Tristis est anima mea is the oratorio’s only
aria, for baritone solo. Liszt set the entire hymn text Stabat mater dolorosa,
which accounts for this number’s inordinate length. He alternated the hymn
tune and a newly composed melody that first appears in connection with
the words Eja mater, fons amoris. In the climactic passage Inflammatus
et accensus, the speaker asks for Mary’s protection when reflecting on the
fires of Judgement Day; orchestral tremolos support the choral exclamation
of the hymn tune, now momentarily in a diatonic guise. Two verses later the
number ends with an effective alternation between the soloists and chorus
moving stepwise upwards on the words paradisi gloria.
In no. 13, O filii et filiae, Liszt set an anonymous Latin Easter hymn text
and melody for sopranos and altos with harmonium, never rising above
a piano dynamic level. Each of the three strophes unfolds with the same
diatonic chord palette, in startling contrast to the two preceding sections.
After the mysterious quiet of the Easter hymn, no. 14 Resurrexit conveys
exultation at Christ’s resurrection. Liszt effectively unifies the entire oratorio
by returning to several earlier materials: at the outset clarinets and bassoons
intone the Rorate coeli melody from no. 1; a large part of what follows uses the
Hosanna melody from no. 10, ‘The Entry into Jerusalem’; the melody of the
alleluia from no. 2, The Annunciation, returns at alleluia here; the orchestra
again intones the Rorate coeli melody as support for the Amen. Thus, the
concluding Resurrexit brings back into focus the prophet Isaiah’s prophecy
about the coming of a Messiah and its earthly fulfilment through Christ’s
communion with his followers in Jerusalem and through his resurrection.
The link to and among these ideas is found at the words Christus vincit
(Christ triumphs), which Liszt sets initially with a rising fifth, the same
interval that opens Rorate coeli and the plainsong on which no. 2 is based.
Overall, Christus does not have the outward operatic trappings of St Elis-
abeth, but its dramatic choral utterances in nos. 8, 10, and 14 bring Christ’s
earthly triumphs into vivid focus. At the same time the lengthy empha-
sis on Christ’s suffering and loss in nos. 11 and 12 remind us that Liszt
was drawn to this aspect of Christ’s life; they allow us to see into Christ’s
and his Mother’s quiet suffering and intense anguish. Their genuineness of
expression suggests that Liszt understood these human experiences.54
Liszt composed Via Crucis c. 1877–9;55 the Regensburg publisher Pustet
rejected it for publication in 1884, together with Septem sacramenta and
Rosario. It was first performed in 1929 in Budapest and was published in
1936. It is scored for solo voices, mixed chorus, and organ or piano.
Like Liszt’s Masses, this work is intended for use in church, in this case for
the devotional service known as the Stations or Way of the Cross, in which the
people make in spirit ‘a pilgrimage to the chief scenes of Christ’s sufferings
and death’.56 When the Stations of the Cross are performed publicly, it is
usual to sing a stanza of Stabat mater dolorosa while passing from one Station
to the next. Liszt adapted this custom by having the chorus sing the hymn in
the second half of Stations 3, 7, and 9 (the Stations that commemorate Jesus’s
successive falls), and in the penultimate 13, to which we will return. Liszt
prefaces the Stations with the hymn Vexilla regis sung in unison, a hymn
praising God who reigned from the Cross, then uses the hymns O Haupt
voll Blut und Wunden in Station 6 and Crux fidelis and O Traurigkeit in
Station 12, then returns to the 6th stanza of Vexilla regis, O crux, ave (varied
as Ave crux) in Station 14.57
Despite these familiar hymn and chorale tunes, the work leaves an aural
impression of an unsettled tonal language. Specifically, nos. 4, 8, and 10
involve sliding chromatic lines and harmonies; when they do come to rest,
the harmony is either diminished or unique (no. 10 ends on the pitches
B D F G A). No. 12 has a series of augmented triads after the words Eli
Eli lama sabacthani (My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?). Other
Stations use successive chromatic chords and may, like no. 5, abruptly end
on a single tone, or like no. 11, on an unusual linear unfolding (A B D F
G A B).58 In this latter case, Liszt may have been projecting a form of his
‘Cross’ motive.
In fact, the Cross motive underlies many of the sections: its basic intervals
(up major 2nd, up minor 3rd) appear in nos. 7, 12 and 14; up minor 2nd,
up major 3rd in nos. 2, 4, 11 and 12; up minor 2nd, down minor 3rd in
nos. 5 and 13. Liszt also provides a unification in Station 13, Jesus is Taken
Down from the Cross, by bringing back the Stabat mater dolorosa, as well as
melodies from Stations 4 and 6. As a whole, the work begins in d minor and
moves to D major in its last thirty-two measures; but even there Liszt inflects
the F a semitone lower three times. This rhetorical gesture on the words
Ave crux, an abbreviation of the hymn text Hail Cross, our only hope, is a
final reminder that our hope was made possible through Christ’s suffering.
In the preface to his Septem sacramenta (composed 1878), Liszt said,
‘The following compositions may be sung in churches and chapels shortly
242 Dolores Pesce
before or during the administering of the Holy Sacraments.’59 Thus, like

Via Crucis, the parts of this work were intended for church services. Liszt
retained the official church ordering: Baptism, Confirmation, Eucharist,
Penance, Extreme Unction, Orders, and Matrimony. The scoring is for
mezzo-soprano and baritone solos, mixed chorus, and organ, harmonium
or piano; the men’s voices predominate, with the women’s choir providing
a colour contrast in Confirmation and Eucharist, and the mezzo soloist in
Matrimony. Liszt’s vocal writing in this work is varied, though he uses a sig-
nificant amount of choral unison and simple block harmony. Notable is the
motivic character of most of the movements. Confirmation has a recurring
motive that outlines a triad, then progresses to an open fifth; Eucharist is
united by a motive A B A G (F); Penance by F B A; Extreme Unction by
movement from E1 F1 G1 A1 to D1 E1 E1 F1 ; and Orders by E1 G1 A1 C2 .
The outer two movements, Baptism in C, Matrimony in F, form a frame
in which a gesture that appears in Baptism (b. 47 D1 B C1 D1 D1 B C1 D1 ,
b. 122 C2 D2 D2 E2 ) resolves at the end of Matrimony (b. 67 D1 C1 ).
Rosario, composed in 1879, is the other piece Liszt unsuccessfully sub-
mitted for publication in 1884. In the preface, Liszt wrote, ‘I lived for some
time in two rooms next to the church of the Madonna del Rosario at Monte
Mario, near Rome. There I sometimes followed the devotions to the Rosary,
to which I am adding this musical accompaniment.’60 Scored for mixed
chorus and organ or harmonium, Rosario consists of three settings of the
Hail Mary and a concluding Pater noster for baritone solo or unison men’s
voices. This work has neither the complexity nor the sophistication of either
Via Crucis or Septem sacramenta. The first and third Ave Marias (Mysteria
gaudiosa and Mysteria gloriosa) are essentially the same, but the middle one
(Mysteria dolorosa) reshapes the melody slightly so that diminished chords
result. The concluding Pater noster is largely a cappella.
Liszt’s Cantantibus organis of 1879 is scored for alto solo, mixed chorus,
and orchestra. It sets the text of the antiphon for St Cecilia whose melody
Liszt had used earlier in the St Cecilia Legend:
Cantantibus organis To the sound of musical instruments

Caecilia Domino decantabat dicens: Cecilia sang to the Lord, saying:
fiat cor meum immaculatum Let my heart be unstained
ut non confundar. So that I suffer no shame.
Liszt wrote the piece for the Palestrina ceremony of the Società musicale
romana in 1880 and it is noteworthy that Palestrina had also set this text.
The unaccompanied soloist sings Cecilia’s lines at two points, using the
same poignant motive heard at the outset in unison strings and at letter F
in unison chorus.
In addition to what has already been discussed, Liszt composed between

1860 and 1886 some twenty-nine shorter choral works and a Latin setting
of Psalm 129 (130). Six are occasional: Slavimo slavno, Slaveni! for men’s
chorus and organ (1863–6), for the millennium celebration of the Slav Saints
Cyril and Methodius; Crux! Hymne des marins for men’s chorus a cappella
or for women’s or children’s chorus with piano (1865), Liszt’s setting of a
text by Guichon de Grandpont, head commissioner of the Marines (the
text ends with a blessing of the marines by Pius IX); Dall’ alma Roma
sommo Pastore (1866) in praise of Pius IX;61 Inno a Maria Vergine (1869)
for mixed chorus with harp and organ or with harp, piano 4 hands, and
harmonium, asking Mary’s protection for Pius IX; Pro papa I for men’s
chorus and organ and II for mixed chorus and organ (1880) in honour of
Leo XIII; Nun danket alle Gott for organ [with mixed or men’s chorus, brass,
percussion ad lib.] (1883) for installation of an organ in Riga. Slavimo uses a
harmonic progression in G major where G is followed by an F chord, lending
this a momentary modal character. Inno a Maria Vergine offers wonderful
timbral changes through its use of organ and harp in addition to the mixed
chorus.
Another eight of the twenty-nine shorter choral works are prayer settings:
Pater noster II for mixed voices and organ (1860?);62 Pater noster III in two
arrangements, one for mixed chorus with organ, one for men’s chorus with
organ or harmonium or piano (1869); Ave Maria II for mixed chorus and
organ (1869); two versions of Anima Christi for men’s chorus and organ
(1874); Sposalizio-Trauung. Ave Maria III for organ or harmonium [with
alto solo and unison soprano and alto voices ad lib.] (1883); Pax vobiscum for
four male voices (solo or chorus) with organ ad lib. (1885); Pater noster IV
for four mixed voices and organ (unverifiable date, unpublished). Whereas
the Ave Maria II and Pater noster III settings are simple and homophonic,
Pater noster II offers more variable textures; neither Pater noster II nor III is
based on plainchant. Sposalizio-Trauung. Ave Maria III is based on Liszt’s
piano piece of that name from the second book of Années de pèlerinage.
Anima Christi is a prayer to Christ, focusing particularly on the healing
powers of his Passion via the blood and water that flowed from his side.
Anima Christi I opens in E minor, then its four middle lines intra vulnera
tua absconde me, ne permittas me separari a te, ab hoste maligno defende me,
in hora mortis meae voca me (Within thy wounds shelter me; never let me be
separated from thee; from the wicked foe defend me; at the hour of my death
please call me) are set for unison voices in a gradually ascending chromatic
line, preparing for a jubilant end in E major. Anima Christi II also moves
from E minor to E major, but its setting of those internal lines is more subtly
inflected. Furthermore, the fluid declamation of Anima Christi I contrasts
with the more four-square articulation of Anima Christi II.
244 Dolores Pesce
The remaining shorter choral pieces include a song in praise of Rome,

O Roma nobilis for mixed chorus and organ (1879); two Christmas songs,
Christus est geboren in two versions with arrangements for mixed chorus,
male chorus, and women’s chorus (1863)63 and O heilige Nacht for tenor
solo, women’s chorus and organ or harmonium (after 1876);64 a funeral
responsory Libera me for men’s chorus and organ which Liszt incorpo-
rated into his Requiem (c.1870–1); two Marian antiphons, Ave Maris stella
in two arrangements, one for mixed chorus and organ or harmonium, one
for men’s chorus and organ or harmonium (1865/66–8) and Salve regina
for mixed chorus (1885); and four hymns: a Vespers hymn for Corpus
Christi Tantum ergo in two arrangements, one for women’s chorus and
organ, one for men’s voices and organ (1869); another hymn for Corpus
Christi O Salutaris hostia in two versions, one for women’s chorus and organ
(1869), one for mixed voices and organ (c. 1869–70); a hymn for the Ele-
vation of the Host, Ave verum corpus, for mixed chorus and organ ad lib.
(1871); another hymn for the Eucharist, O sacrum convivium for alto solo
and mezzo-soprano/alto chorus ad lib. with harmonium or organ (after
1880).65 Liszt used the traditional hymn texts in all four cases, but not their
associated melodies. All four focus on Christ’s bodily sacrifice, as did Anima
Christi, Christus, and Via Crucis. Thus, from 1865 on, Liszt seems to have
concentrated intensely on Christ’s Passion and its redemptive power. All four
hymns use chromaticism or unresolved chords to evoke Christ’s suffering.
Ave verum corpus overlays chromatic tones on a series of suspensions in bb.
11–30. O salutaris hostia I for women’s chorus sets the words bella premunt
hostilia (our foes press on from every side) first with a three-chord progres-
sion of diminished, major, diminished, then with diminished, augmented,
diminished.66 Tantum ergo is set for women’s chorus and for men’s chorus
with slight differences between the two. Here chromaticism is minimally
apparent except for an F–F inflection in bb. 23–4 and 45–6; Liszt thus
incorporated a rhetorical gesture associated with suffering, although of the
four hymn texts this one speaks least directly to Christ’s suffering. O sacrum
convivium sets the words recolitur memoria passionis ejus (the memory of
his Passion is renewed) with an augmented triad; more will be said below.
Five shorter pieces and Psalm 129 (130) remain: Ossa arida for men’s
chorus and organ or piano 4 hands (1879); In domum Domini ibimus for
mixed chorus, organ, brass and percussion (after 1880);67 Mariengarten.
Quasi Cedrus! for SSAT and organ (before 1885);68 Qui seminant in lacrimis
for mixed chorus and organ (1884); Qui Mariam absolvisti for baritone solo,
mixed chorus, organ or harmonium (1885); Psalm 129 (130) De profundis
for bass or alto voice and piano or organ (1883–6).69 As a group, they share
certain features of textual content and tonal language.
Ossa arida sets Ezekiel 37:4: ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord!’
The context is a vision in which God instructs Ezekiel to speak to the piled
bones so that they coalesce into living beings; God tells Ezekiel that these
resurrected bones are the house of Israel, giving him hope that his people will
be restored from their exile. Thus, the passage tells of national and spiritual
restoration. Liszt mentioned the work in connection with his desire to depict
the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, another vision, so, at least in part, the
passage’s evocation of a visual image was what attracted Liszt to it (BR VII,
393).
The next three pieces, In domum Domini, Mariengarten, and Qui sem-
inant, also set Old Testament passages, from Psalm 122:1, Ecclesiasticus
24:13–15 (Sirach 24:13–15), and Psalm 126:5 respectively. All three pas-
sages are used in the liturgy of the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin, and,
therefore, with Rosario, may suggest an increased devotion to Mary on Liszt’s
part.70 More specifically, Psalm 122:1 reads, ‘Let us go to the house of the
Lord!’; its context is a praise of Zion as the pilgrim’s goal. Ecclus. 24:13–15
reads:
I grew tall like a cedar in Lebanon, and as a cypress tree on Mount Sion. I
was exalted like a palm tree in Cades and as a rose-plant in Jericho. As a fair
olive tree in the plains, and as a plane tree by the water in streets, was I
exalted. I gave forth a sweet fragrance like cinnamon and aromatic balm. I
yielded a sweetness of odour like the choicest myrrh.
The context of this excerpt is a praise of Wisdom, who ‘took root in an

honoured people’, in Jerusalem. Psalm 126:5 reads, ‘May those who sow
in tears reap with shouts of joy!’ Its context is a prayer that God’s favour
be granted to his people once again. In addition to their Marian connec-
tion, Liszt may have been attracted to the message of these three texts
praising God’s people and their quest for Zion and heaven. In domum
Domini is particularly telling in this regard, because twenty-four bars from
the end it quotes the bell motif from Wagner’s Parsifal where the bells
accompany a procession of knights bearing Amfortas to the Grail Hall. The
bells signify a ceremonial movement towards God and thus Liszt alludes to
them in highlighting the Psalm’s message of moving into the house of the
Lord.
The source of the last of the five shorter pieces, Qui Mariam absolvisti, is
the Dies irae of the Requiem Mass. Its text reads: ‘Thou who didst absolve
Mary (Magdalene), and heeded the thief, hast also given hope to me.’ It
shares the sentiment of hope expressed in Ossa arida and the three other
Old Testament pieces. Psalm 129 (130) De profundis is a prayer asking for
God’s mercy in the face of personal difficulty and also expressing hope in his
redemptive power for the nation of Israel. De profundis is most commonly
recited in prayers for the dead.71
With this overview of textual content in mind, we turn to the tonal lan-
guage of these late pieces, adding O sacrum convivium to the discussion.
246 Dolores Pesce
Excepting O sacrum convivium and Qui Mariam absolvisti, the other pieces
close on a major chord, signalling a hopeful message. Ossa arida is most
often discussed because its first twenty bars consist almost entirely of super-
imposed rising thirds, building from p sotto voce to fortissimo at the utterance
of the words ‘Dry bones!’ This strange passage evokes an unworldly mood
appropriate to Ezekiel’s vision. The next section of the piece uses harmonic
progression by thirds, grounded in A major; the successive chromatic shifts
are colourful and again provoke awe, giving way to a diatonic ending. In the
case of Qui seminant in lacrimis, Liszt infuses it with more overt melodic
chromaticism to evoke a sense of sorrow up to the words ‘reap with shouts
of joy’. This is really the same illustrative approach he took in the 1870s for
his Corpus Christi and Eucharist hymns. Similarly, Mariengarten uses its
chromaticism at the mention of exotic spices beginning at sicut cinnamo-
mum (like cinnamon), while the previous lines and the ending in plenitudine
sanctorum detentio mea (and my abode is in the full assembly of the saints)
are diatonic. The piece also reveals a certain tonal manipulation that does
not proceed from a textual response. The opening line suggests a tonal ambi-
guity between A major and F minor that lingers at the end when the three
final chords are C F and A. Furthermore, Liszt unfolds a large-scale chro-
matic movement from F1 to F2 that persists even when the local passage
is diatonic. In domum Domini seems to progress solely according to a tonal
plan, given that it repeats the same text line over and over. Liszt unfolds a
linear movement between E1 and B1 three times, each time filling it in
with different forms of the intervening tones. Then, after the Parsifal bell
insertion, he sounds B1 C2 D2 E2 , with a final diatonic ascent from E1
to E2 minus the pitch D.
O sacrum convivium and Qui Mariam absolvisti also display a distinctive
tonal language that goes beyond the sort of local word- or affect-colouration
mentioned earlier for O sacrum wherein Liszt sets ‘the memory of his Passion
is renewed’ with an augmented triad. Both use a linear unfolding similar to
that found in Mariengarten and In domum Domini, but both end somewhat
open-ended, suggesting a more generalised affective response to the text. O
sacrum sets its text
O sacrum convivium, in quo Christus O sacred banquet, in which Christ is

sumitur, received,
recolitur memoria passionis ejus, the memory of his Passion is renewed,
mens impletur gratia, the mind is filled with grace,
et futurae gloriae nobis pignus and a pledge of future glory is given to
datur. us.
and then closes with a return to the initial phrase O sacrum convium. Rather
than solidify the E major focus that has returned with that phrase, the
keyboard accompaniment ends with an E chord in second inversion, fol-

lowed by a single descending line that settles yearningly on B (E D CB F
GC A B). The remainder of the hymn, which Liszt did not set, beseeches
God to grant us reverence for the sacred mysteries of Christ’s Body and
Blood so that we can experience the Eucharist as redemptive fruit. The final
yearning gesture A-B, which permeates the piece, captures this sense of
longing and mystery.
Qui Mariam absolvisti is the sparsest of all the shorter choral pieces. It
consists mostly of a single line, never sounding more than two tones at
once. Liszt reduces his materials here to one basic motif that expands and
contracts, finally outlining the fifth F-C1 , and ending with the single line
C1 F D1 C1 . Although an E leading-tone is not present in the last twenty-
eight bars, the melodic unfolding informs us that F should be the tonic, so
that the final C suggests a latent resolution yet to come. The sigh figure D C
furthermore lends a sad tone, just as the A-B of O sacrum yields a sense
of yearning. So, the music of Qui Mariam interprets its words mihi quoque
spem dedisti (Thou hast also given hope to me) with a somewhat complicated
affect of sad anticipation. Given that these lines are from the Dies irae, the
sad anticipation ties into Liszt’s attitude towards death.
Finally, our discussion turns to Liszt’s setting of Psalm 129 (130) De
profundis, whose music he intended to use in his unfinished oratorio
St Stanislaus.72 This work too ends with a major chord, signalling a hopeful
message; in fact approximately one third of the way through at the words
quia apud te propitiatio est (because there is forgiveness with Thee), Liszt
adds a four-sharp key signature announcing an E major anchor for the
remainder of the piece. But the opening of the work reveals Liszt using an
unusual tonal gesture to evoke the ‘depths’ from which the cry for help is
uttered, here a series of ascending major sevenths rising from a low to higher
range in the organ.73 Paul Merrick relates the pitches that form the sevenths,
as they are sounded linearly in the solo voice – B C E F – to a form of the
Cross motive.74 If he is correct, then from the outset this work shows us
Liszt’s focus on the redemptive powers of Christ’s Crucifixion. Certainly the
work’s last twenty-four bars emphasise redemption by abstracting from et
ipse redimet Israel ex omnibus iniquitatibus ejus (and God will redeem Israel
from all their sins) the two words ipse redimet and repeating them twice
more; significantly, only with these two repetitions does Liszt reduce the
section’s tendency to chromatic chords.75
In conclusion, Liszt composed some sixty pieces of sacred choral music

between age 33 and his death at 75. These works included oratorios, Masses,
settings of psalms, prayers and hymns, pieces for Sts Cecilia, Francis of
Assisi and Francis of Paula, and Christopher,76 and settings of devotions,
248 Dolores Pesce
specifically the Way of the Cross, the Rosary, and the Seven Sacraments.
Many of these pieces, particularly after 1860, were intended for use within
the liturgy or extra-liturgical devotions. Given their functional nature, there
can be no doubt about Liszt’s sincere desire to serve his religion through
his art. Also suggestive of his conviction is the fact that, when he was urged
to stage the most popular of his sacred works, the St Elisabeth oratorio, he
refused to have it secularised.
An overview of the texts Liszt set is revealing.77 Ave Maria, Pater noster,
and Te Deum are common prayers and therefore not of special consequence,
which is also true of his two Christmas songs, Christus ist geboren and O
heilige Nacht. His settings of Rosario and two Marian antiphons indicate
an increased attention to Mary at the end of his life, prompted, as sug-
gested above, by religious doctrine of the time. The psalm texts fall into four
categories: praise of God (18 (19), 67, 97, 116 (117), 122), expressions of
hope and trust in God in times of adversity (23), lament (120 (130), 126,
137), and a wisdom psalm (73).78 The other Old Testament texts, Ezekiel
37:4 and Ecclesiasticus 24:17–20, speak of spiritual restoration and praise
of Wisdom. A significant number of texts focus on Christ’s bodily sacrifice,
evidenced in the four hymns Tantum ergo, O Salutaris hostia, Ave verum cor-
pus, and O sacrum convivium, as well as in the prayer setting Anima Christi,
the oratorio Christus, and Via Crucis.
In the light of this combined textual content, Liszt’s turn to Sts Francis
of Assisi and Christopher among the five saints he treats is of interest.79
St Francis of Assisi, the saint who received the stigmata, or five wounds
of Christ, showed his willingness to take on physical suffering as a sign
of Christ’s suffering and death on the Cross. St Christopher is the saint
who willingly accepted the task of carrying people, for God’s sake, across
a raging stream. One day he was carrying a child who continually grew
heavier, and who eventually revealed himself as Christ. Many interpret the
stream and weight of the child to denote the trials and struggles of a soul
taking upon itself the yoke of Christ in this world. Liszt was thus drawn to two
Christian figures who linked to his almost obsessive evocation of the pained,
yet comforting, image of Christ who redeemed us through his sufferings,
death and resurrection. That Liszt identified with such earthly struggles,
particularly those of St Francis, can be corroborated in his writings. As he
sought to endure the human condition, he also turned to Old Testament
texts that express hope in God and the possibility of redemption. In short,
Liszt played out his heartfelt spiritual search through the sacred choral music
he composed, particularly in the coherent body of works that emerged from
1860 to the end of his life.
Notes
1 Liszt: the Romantic artist Resource Centre for Music Education, the
1. The explication of Romanticism as a paradox School of Music, University of Western Australia,
of internal contradictions has a long and 1995), pp. 91–104; Richard Leppert, ‘Cultural
distinguished history, reflective perhaps of the Contradiction, Idolatry, and the Piano Virtuoso:
frustration experienced by cultural historians Franz Liszt’, in James Parakilas et al., eds., Piano
who have attempted to forge a coherent Roles: Three Hundred Years of Life with the Piano
definition with its roots in the artworks (New Haven & London: Yale University Press,
themselves. It is far easier to define Romanticism 1999), pp. 252–81; and Lawrence Kramer, ‘Franz
in terms of that which its exponents rejected Liszt and the Virtuoso Public Sphere: Sight and
(rigidity, compromise, ease, predictability, Sound in the Rise of Mass Entertainment’, in
pragmatism, slavishness to tradition) or to idem, Musical Meaning: Towards a Critical
define the elements of a Romantic attitude to life History (Berkeley, Los Angeles & London:
and art (vocation, integrity, idealism, University of California Press, 2001), pp. 68–99.
self-sacrifice, minoritarianism) than to bring the However, the most sophisticated exposition to
artworks of European Romanticism tidily under date of the Lisztian virtuoso/work-concept
a single roof. Excellent examples of the problem occurs in Jim Samson, Virtuosity and
‘contradictions’ approach are given in Alfred the Musical Work: the ‘Transcendental Studies’ of
Einstein, Music in the Romantic Era (London: Liszt (Cambridge University Press, 2003), esp.
J. M. Dent & Sons, 1947), pp. 37–52; and pp. 66–86; see also my ‘Berlioz, the Sublime and
Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, ed. the Broderie Problem’, in Hector Berlioz:
Henry Hardy (London: Pimlico, 2000), Miscellaneous Studies, ed. Fulvia Morabito and
pp. 14–20. Michela Niccolai (Bologna: Ut Orpheus
2. Liszt, An Artist’s Journey. Lettres d’un bachelier Edizioni, 2005), 1–31. On Schumann’s criticism,
ès musique 1835–41: Franz Liszt, ed. and trans. see Leon B. Plantinga, Schumann as Critic (New
Charles Suttoni (Chicago & London: University Haven: Yale University Press, 1967); on Herz in
of Chicago Press, 1989), p. xiv. Schlesinger’s journal, see my Music Criticism in
3. Heinrich Heine, ‘Lettre confidentielle II’, Nineteenth-Century France: ‘La Revue et Gazette
Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris (henceforth musicale de Paris’, 1834–1880 (Cambridge
RGM), 4 February 1838, given in An Artist’s University Press, 1995), pp. 143–5.
Journey, p. 221. 7. The central figure in Hoffmann’s Kreisleriana,
4. Ibid. a cycle of musical essays dating from 1814–15;
5. After the tormented hero of Chateaubriand’s Kreisler reappears in Hoffmann’s satirical novel
novel of the same name. Eleanor Perényi in Kater Murr (1820–1).
particular is dismissive: Liszt: the Artist as 8. Balzac, Gambara (1837), given in my Music
Romantic Hero (Boston & Toronto: Atlantic – Criticism, p. 51.
Little Brown, 1974), p. 19. For an alternative 9. Liszt, Lettres d’un bachelier, La Revue et
interpretation, see Alan Walker, Franz Liszt: the Gazette musicale (RGM) (22 July 1838), given in
Virtuoso Years 1811–1847 (rev. edn, London & An Artist’s Journey, 66. I follow the now broad
Boston: Faber and Faber, 1989), p. 138. consensus that in these and other early writings
6. Robert Wangermée, ‘Conscience et the message is Liszt’s, the medium often
inconscience du virtuose romantique: à propos d’Agoult.
des années parisiennes de Franz Liszt’, in Music 10. Liszt, Lettres d’un bachelier, RGM
in Paris in the Eighteen-Thirties, ed. Peter Bloom (12 February 1837), given in An Artist’s Journey,
(Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon, 1987), pp. 553–73. p. 13.
Three recent essays have centred on aspects of 11. Liszt, Lettres d’un bachelier, RGM (16 July
this contradiction, which is central to an 1837), given in An Artist’s Journey, p. 28.
understanding of Liszt as a Romantic artist: 12. Liszt, Lettres d’un bachelier, RGM (25 March
Kerry Murphy, ‘Liszt and Virtuosity in Paris in 1838), given in An Artist’s Journey, p. 62.
the 1830s: the Artist as Romantic Hero’, in Frank 13. Liszt, Lettres d’un bachelier, Gazette musicale
Calloway, ed., Essays in Honour of David Evatt (24 October 1839), given in An Artist’s Journey,
Tunley (Nedlands, AUS: Calloway International 186. As a composer, Liszt was always attracted to
[249]
250 Notes to pages 4–10
the idea of ‘translating’ literature and visual 24. Liszt, Lettres d’un bachélier, RGM
images into music: Vallée d’Obermann (2 September 1838), given in An Artist’s Journey,
(Senancour) and the Harmonies poétiques et p. 88.
religieuses (Lamartine) are early examples of a 25. Hanska, ‘Journal’, given in Williams, Portrait
long-standing practice. of Liszt, p. 199.
14. See the reviews quoted in Murphy, ‘Liszt and 26. Cited in Murphy, ‘Liszt and Virtuosity’,
Virtuosity’, p. 100. p. 102. For more detail on Liszt, Berlioz and the
15. Relevant extracts from his letters of 10 and place of the sublime in French Romantic musical
16 September 1840 are given in Williams, thinking, see my ‘Berlioz, the Sublime, and the
Portrait of Liszt, pp. 142–3. Broderie Problem’.
16. Though unnamed, Liszt was recognised by 27. On Liszt and the sublime, see also Leppert,
his contemporaries as the model for the ‘Cultural Contradiction’, p. 259.
pianist-composer Brand-Sachs – an identity 28. The relevant section of Burke’s treatise is
which he was later at pains to deny (see given in Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth
Correspondance de Liszt et de la comtesse and Early Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Peter Le
d’Agoult, ed. Daniel Ollivier (Paris: Bernard Huray and James Day (abridged edn, Cambridge
Grasset, 1934), vol. II, 1840–1864, 372). University Press, 1988), pp. 61–2.
Extracts from the story are available in 29. Berlioz’s first account appeared in the
Pierre-Antoine Huré and Claude Knepper, Journal des débats, 12 March 1837; the second
eds., Liszt en son temps (Paris: Hachette, 1987), was the revision he prepared for A travers
pp. 170–4. chants (for a modern edition, see Hector Berlioz:
17. De Ferrière, Brand-Sachs, RGM (1 May ‘The Art of Music’ and Other Essays (‘A travers
1836), p. 138. Further references to chants’), trans. Elizabeth Csicsery-Rónay
Brand-Sachs’s artistic contacts, lifestyle, (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
enthusiasm for philosophy and vision of the University Press, 1994), 40. Legouvé’s account
artist’s priestly role cement the identity of appears in his Soixante ans de souvenirs, 4th edn
Brand-Sachs and Liszt (ibid.). (Paris, 1886), given in Williams, A Portrait of
18. My translation. It is notable that Marie Liszt, pp. 42–3.
d’Agoult described Liszt in similar terms in her 30. Kramer, ‘Franz Liszt’, pp. 74 and 79. Kramer
Mémoires, even using the word ‘fantôme’ to advances both these hypotheses, thereby neatly
describe her impression of him at their first illustrating the paradox of the virtuoso
meeting. See Bellas, ‘Du fantastique au interpreter that underlies his essay. He does,
merveilleux: Liszt, fils d’Hoffmann, chez M. de however, favour the ‘invisible showman’
Pontmartin’, in Missions et démarches de la interpretation (p. 79).
critique: mélanges offerts au professeur J.-A. Vier 31. Berlioz, Evenings in the Orchestra, trans.
(Paris: Klincksieck, 1973), pp. 157–70, at p. 158. C. R. Fortescue (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
19. RGM, 24 April 1836, p. 133. Translations 1963), p. 152.
mine. 32. Théophile Gautier, ‘Franz Liszt’, in La Presse,
20. De Ferrière, Brand-Sachs, given in Huré and 22 April 1844.
Knepper, Liszt en son temps, 173. Translation 33. Heinrich Heine, ‘Lettres confidentielles II’,
mine. De Ferrière’s description accords precisely RGM, 4 February 1838, given in An Artist’s
with accounts of Liszt’s playing which Journey, p. 223.
emphasised the Romantic sublime, discussed 34. Caroline Barbey-Boissier, La comtesse Agénor
below. de Gasparin et sa famille: correspondance et
21. De Ferrière was indeed ambivalent towards souvenirs 1813–1894 (Paris: Plon-Nourrit et al.,
the Romantic movement; but he was also 1902), given in Williams, Portrait of Liszt, p. 49.
enamoured of Marie d’Agoult, and Brand-Sachs 35. Journal entry from Robert Bory, Une retraite
was undoubtedly motivated by a desire for romantique en Suisse (Lausanne: Editions SPES,
revenge – a desire which lay behind two other 1930), given in Williams, Portrait of Liszt, p. 71.
famous portrayals of Liszt, in Balzac’s Béatrix, ou 36. Ibid., p. 79.
les amours forcés of 1839 (instigated by George 37. A more detailed analysis of this painting is
Sand) and Marie d’Agoult’s own Nélida (1846). given by Richard Leppert in ‘Cultural
Liszt refused to recognise himself in any of these Contradiction’, pp. 256–7. Like so many of his
romans à clef. predecessors, however, Leppert sees the
22. Liszt, article in L’Artiste, 16 June–11 August all-important bust of Beethoven as placed within
1839, given in An Artist’s Journey, pp. 114–15. the room, on the piano, and not belonging to a
23. Bellas, ‘Du fantastique au merveilleux’, different world.
p. 158. Translation mine. 38. Balzac, Béatrice, given in Perényi, Liszt, p. 89.
39. Samson analyses Liszt’s relationship to the 48. Ibid., p. xvii.

archetype of the alienated Romantic hero in 49. As, for instance, in Berlioz’s utopian town of
similar vein, noting that he ‘bought into this Euphonia, where ‘In spite of the tremendous
understanding of the hero . . . but only up to a curiosity which [the town’s music festivals]
point’, and that his heroic ideal was less the excite throughout the empire, under no
angst-ridden or stoic sufferer than the ‘Byronic circumstances would a listener be admitted if he
actor and doer’ (Samson, Virtuosity, 181). On was known to be unsuited and therefore
the relation of Liszt to progress, reform and an unworthy to attend’ (Berlioz, ‘Euphonia, or the
avant-garde, see John Williamson, ‘Progress, Musical Town, a Tale of the Future’, from
Modernity and the Concept of an Avant-Garde’, Evenings in the Orchestra, p. 255).
in The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century 50. His transcriptions of Berlioz’s orchestral
Music, ed. Jim Samson (Cambridge, 2002), music are particularly important in this respect.
287–317. 51. Liszt,‘De la situation des artistes’, in Pages
40. Ralph P. Locke, Music, Musicians and the romantiques, p. 58.
Saint-Simonians (Chicago & London: University 52. A key document in this respect is Liszt’s
of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 58–9. letter of 23 January to Marie d’Agoult, in which
41. Emile Barrault, Aux artistes. Du passé et de he proposed to rebuild Weimar’s cultural life
l’avenir des beaux-arts. (Doctrine de around the three institutions of Court, Theatre
Saint-Simon) (Paris: A. Mesnier, 1830), given in and University. See Correspondance de Liszt et de
Locke, Saint-Simonians, p. 57. la comtesse d’Agoult, vol. I, 1833–1840, p. 323.
42. Barrault, Aux artistes, given in Locke, 53. My thanks to Ken Hamilton for pointing out
Saint-Simonians, p. 49. What may not have been this relationship.
apparent to Liszt was that Barrault’s manifesto – 54. See Paul A. Munson,‘The Librettos for Liszt’s
with all its Romantic images of soaring birds and Oratorio St Stanislaus’, in Music & Letters 78(4)
heavenly fire – was a personal one, intended as a (November 1997), pp. 532–50, esp. pp. 548– 50.
persuasive tool in the evolving debates about 55. Williamson, ‘Progress’, p. 308.
social hierarchies within the movement. Official
documents from 1830 and 1831 made clear that 2 Inventing Liszt’s life: early biography
the Saint-Simonian artist was not priest, but and autobiography
only populariser – the essential mediator 1. La Mara [Marie Lipsius], ed., Franz Liszts
between the leaders of the movement and the Briefe, 2nd edn (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel,
common people. See Locke, Saint-Simonians, 1900), p. 316. ‘Zu einer Hälfte Zigeuner, zur
pp. 47–52. Part of Liszt’s essay ‘De la situation andern Franziskaner’.
des artistes et de leur condition dans la société’ 2. Alan Walker, Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years
of 1835 may be indebted to Barrault’s manifesto. 1811–1847 (rev. edn, Ithaca, NY: Cornell
Artists become: ‘predestined, thunderstruck, University Press, 1988), p. 1.
enthralled men who have carried off the sacred 3. Joseph d’Ortigue, ‘Etude biographique’,
flame from heaven . . . these priests of an Gazette musicale de Paris (1835). Translated into
ineffable, mystical and eternal religion which German as ‘Franz Listz’ [sic] by Emil Flechsig, in
takes root and grows incessantly in our hearts’. Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 4 (1836), pp. 13–16,
Given in An Artist’s Journey, p. xxii. 19–21, 23–4, 27–30, 31–5, 39–40.
43. Translated extracts from this aphoristic 4. Walker, The Virtuoso Years, p. 1.
work are given in Paul Merrick, Revolution and 5. Lina Ramann, Lisztiana, ed. Arthur Seidl
Religion in the Music of Liszt (Cambridge (Mainz: Schott, 1983), p. 50. ‘Biographisch habe
University Press, 1987), pp. 12–13. ich viel umzustoßen und richtig zu stellen:
44. Liszt, Lettres d’un bachelier, RGM Gustav Schilling hat manches gesündigt –
(11 February 1838), given in An Artist’s Journey, Geschichtenschreibung anstatt
p. 50. Geschichtsschreibung. Ich hatte mehrfach auf
45. Liszt, Lettres d’un bachelier, RGM (12 February ihn gefußt, habe nun eine heillose Arbeit, und
1837), given in An Artist’s Journey, pp. 20–1. muß dazu ganze Parthien, auf die ich große
46. Liszt,‘De la situation des artistes’, RGM (3 Sorgfalt verwendet, streichen.’
May 1835). Given in An Artist’s Journey, p. 237. 6. Eva Rieger, ‘So schlecht wie ihr Ruf?: Die
For the complete text, see Franz Liszt: Pages Liszt-Biographin Lina Ramann’, Neue Zeitschrift
romantiques, ed. Jean Chantavoine (Paris and für Musik 147 (1986), pp. 16–20, James Deaville,
Leipzig: Editions d’Aujourd’ hui, 1912), ‘Lina Ramann und La Mara: Zwei Frauen, ein
pp. 1–83. Schicksal’, in Cornelia Szabó-Knotik and Markus
47. Liszt, Lettres d’un bachelier, RGM (28 March Grassl, eds., Frauen in der Musikwissenschaft
1838), given in An Artist’s Journey, p. 168. (Vienna: Universität für Musik und Darstellende
Kunst, 1999), pp. 239–52, and James Deaville, 19. Eleanor Perényi, Franz Liszt, the Artist as
‘Writing Liszt: Lina Ramann, Marie Lipsius and Romantic Hero (Boston: Little, Brown and Co.,
Early Musicology’, Journal of Musicological 1974), pp. 43–4. This issue, with reference to
Research 21 (2002), pp. 73–98. Perényi, has been reconsidered in a recent article,
7. These include Johann Wilhelm Christern’s Ben Arnold, ‘Franz Liszt: An Autobiographical
Franz Liszt nach seinem Leben und Wirken of and Virtuosic Revolution’, in Hans Kagebeck and
1841; Ramann’s Franz Liszt als Künstler und Johan Lagerfelt, eds., Liszt the Progressive
Mensch, Vol. I, and a copy of P. Trifonoff ’s (Lewiston, Queenston, Lampeter: Edwin Mellen
‘François Liszt’, an article that was not published Press, 2001), pp. 3–14.
until 1884. See Walker, The Virtuoso Years, pp. 4, 20. I have discussed this event in somewhat
10, 18. Liszt further made substantial additions greater detail in ‘Liszt’s Musical Monuments’,
to the proofs of an encyclopedia entry in 19th-Century Music 26(1) (2002), pp. 52–72.
Biographie des Contemporains (Paris: Glaeser & 21. For details on the event from the
Co.), which was sent to him in 1881. See Julius perspective of the organising committee, see
Kapp, ‘Autobiographisches von Franz Liszt’, Die Heinrich K. Breidenstein, Inauguration des
Musik 11 (1911), pp. 10–14. Beethoven Monuments zu Bonn (Bonn, 1846;
8. ‘Mehrmals ersuchten mich Verleger, reprint, Bonn: Ludwig Röhrscheid Verlag, 1983).
Memoiren zu schreiben: ich lehnte es ab mit der 22. Remarkably, Liszt made a plea to erect
Entschuldigung, dass es mir mehr als genügt, statues for great women, too. See ‘Weimars
mein Leben zu durchleben, ohne es dem Papier Septemberfest: Zur Feier des hundertjährigen
zu überliefern.’ Letter to Otto Lessmann, Geburtstags Carl Augusts 1857’ in Franz Liszt,
Weimar 4 November 1882. In La Mara, ed., Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. V, trans. Lina
Franz Liszts Briefe (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, Ramann (reprint, Hildesheim: Olms, 1978),
1893), Vol. II, p. 334. p. 127.
9. Ibid. 23. Kölnische Zeitung, Beilage 183 (2 July 1845).
10. The authorship of Liszt’s writing has been See also Hans-Josef Irmen, ‘Franz Liszt in Bonn,
under dispute since Emile Haraszti claimed oder: Wie die erste Beethovenhalle entstand’, in
controversially, in his pioneering 1937 article Marianne Bröcker and Günther Massenkeil,
‘Le problème Liszt’ (Acta Musicologica 9 (1937), eds., Studien zur Bonner Musikgeschichte des 18.
pp. 123–36, 10 (1938), pp. 32–46), that none of und 19. Jahrhunderts (Cologne: Arno Volk
Liszt’s writings, save for his private Verlag, 1978), p. 52.
correspondence, was authored by him. To this 24. This celebrated incident has been reported
day, the issue remains unsettled; the focus, repeatedly; see, for instance, Ramann, Liszt als
however, has become a question of degree. Künstler und Mensch; La Mara, ‘Beethovens
11. Franz Liszt, ‘Paganini’, in Gesammelte Weihekuß’, Allgemeine Musikzeitung 40 (1913),
Schriften, ed. Lina Ramann (reprint, Hildesheim pp. 544–6; Allan Keiler, ‘Liszt and Beethoven:
Georg Olms, 1978), Vol. II, p. 112. The Creation of a Personal Myth’, Nineteenth
12. Leslie Stephen, ‘Autobiography’, Cornhill Century Music 17 (1988), pp. 116–31, and
Magazine 43 (April 1881), p. 410. Walker, The Virtuoso Years, pp. 417–26. For a
13. Anon., ‘Famous Autobiographies’, somewhat self-indulgent queer reading see
Edinburgh Review (1911), p. 345. See Laura Kevin Kopelson, Beethoven’s Kiss: Pianism,
Marcus, Auto/Biographical Discourses Perversion and the Mastery of Desire (Palo Alto,
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). In
1994), p. 58. connection with the surrounding Beethoven
14. Marcus, Auto/Biographical Discourses, p. 58. celebrations, see also Susanne Schaal, ‘Das
15. See ibid., pp. 56–89. Beethoven-Denkmal von Julius Hähnel in Bonn’,
16. Philippe Lejeune, who is intent on rescuing in Ingrid Bodsch, ed., Monument für Beethoven
the authenticity of the genre, has proposed the (Bonn: Bonner Stadtmuseum), p. 51; Michael
notion of an ‘autobiographical pact’ between the Ladenburger, ‘Wie sich das “neue Bonn”
author and his readership, centring on the truth bewährte oder: Das Musikfest zwischen den
and authenticity of the written text. The Fronten’, in Bodsch, ed., Monument für
readership necessarily believes that author, Beethoven, pp. 148–9, and Irmen, ‘Franz Liszt in
narrator and narrated subject are one and the Bonn’, p. 57.
same person. 25. See Ladenburger, ‘Wie sich das “neue Born”
17. See Paul de Man, ‘Autobiography as bewährte’.
Self-Defacement’, in The Rhetoric of 26. A[ugust] S[chmidt], ‘Fliegende Blätter aus
Romanticism (New York: Columbia University meinem Reise-Portefeuille’, Wiener Allgemeine
Press, 1984), p. 69. Musik-Zeitung 5 (1845), p. 402.
18. Ramann, Lisztiana, p. 407. 27. Ibid., p. 403.
28. This is confirmed from all critical quarters: of Liszt bibliography and editorial skills have
the tenor is that Liszt possesses ‘enormous talent’, been of great help. Also, I thank Evelyn Liepsch
that he shows ‘great promise’, and possesses of the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv, Stiftung
‘princely gifts’. (See, for instance, Moscheles, as Weimarer Klassik, Tamara Levitz of UCLA, and
quoted in Adrian Williams, Portrait of Liszt Alan Walker and Pauline Pocknell for their
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 216.) answers to specific questions.
29. See Günther Massenkeil, ‘Die Bonner 2. A whole discourse against virtuosity had
Beethoven-Kantate von Franz Liszt’, in Jobst developed in Germany of the nineteenth
Peter Fricke, ed., Die Sprache der Musik: century. See James Deaville, ‘The Making of a
Festschrift für Klaus W. Niemöller zum 60. Myth: Liszt, the Press, and Virtuosity’, in
Geburtstag (Cologne: Arno Volk, 1989), Michael Saffle and James Deaville, eds., New
pp. 395–7. Light on Liszt and His Music: Essays in Honor of
30. The allegorical bas-reliefs of the Beethoven Alan Walker’s 65th Birthday, Analecta Lisztiana
statue endeavour to represent Beethoven’s II, Franz Liszt Studies Series 6 (Stuyvesant, NY:
excellence in the fields of dramatic music, sacred Pendragon Press, 1997), pp. 181–95.
music, symphony and fantasy – which, from the 3. See Michael Saffle’s Liszt in Germany
perspective of the twenty-first century, would 1840–1845: A Study in Sources, Documents, and
seem to constitute a serious distortion of the History of Reception (Stuyvesant, NY:
Beethoven’s oeuvre. For a discussion of the Pendragon Press, 1994) for a detailed study of
Beethoven statue from an art-historical the ‘Lisztomania’ in Germany. The term was
viewpoint, see Schaal, ‘Das Beethoven-Denkmal’. coined by Heine in response to the audience’s
31. Letter of 28 April 1845 to Abbé de enthusiasm at Liszt concerts.
Lamennais, in La Mara, ed., Franz Liszts Briefe, 4. James Deaville, ‘The Controversy
Vol. I, p. 55. ‘Le texte du moins en est assez neuf; Surrounding Liszt’s Conception of Programme
c’est une sorte de Magnificat du Génie humain Music’, in Jim Samson and Bennett Zon, eds.,
conquis par Dieu à la révélation éternelle à Nineteenth Century Music: Selected Proceedings of
travers le temps et l’espace; texte qui pourrait the Tenth International Conference (Aldershot:
aussi bien s’appliquer à Goethe ou Raphael, ou Ashgate, 2002), pp. 98–124.
Colomb, qu’à Beethoven.’ On Liszt’s relation to 5. Sacheverell Sitwell, Liszt (London: Faber and
Beethoven see also Axel Schröter, ‘Der Name Faber, 1934), p. 323.
Beethoven ist heilig in der Kunst’: Studien zu Liszts 6. Walter Abendroth, ‘Sechzig Jahre Bayreuth’,
Beethoven-Rezeption (Sinzig: Studio, 1999). Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 63 (1936), p. 493.
32. On aspects of this issue see Matthias 7. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A
Wiegandt, Vergessene Symphonik?: Studien zu Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University
Joachim Raff, Carl Reinecke und zum Problem der Press, 1973), and Kevin Korsyn, ‘Towards a New
Epigonalität in der Musik (Sinzig: Studio, 1997); Poetics of Musical Influence’, Music Analysis 10
Penelope Murray, ed., Genius: the History of an (1991), pp. 3–72.
Idea (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), and Jochen 8. About intertextuality, see Julia Kristeva,
Schmidt, Die Geschichte des Genie-Gedankens in ‘Word, Dialogue, and the Novel’ (1969),
der deutschen Literatur, Philosophie und Politik, reprinted by Toril Moi in The Kristeva Reader
1750–1945 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986),
Buchgesellschaft, 1985). pp. 34–61. Among others, Adam Krims has
33. ‘Wenn sein Volk der Fürst vertritt / In den provided an interesting model for the
späteren Annalen, / Wer vertritt denn ihre application of intertextuality to music in his
Qualen, / Wer verkündet, was sie litt? / Wer steht article ‘Music Theory as Productivity’,
im Buch der Weltgeschichte für sie auf? / Lässt Canadian University Music Review 20 (2000),
ihren Namen strahlen durch der Zeiten Lauf? / pp. 16–30.
Arme Menschheit, schweres Loos! / Wer wird 9. These and other aspects of Bakhtin’s thought
von dir entsendet an der Tage Schluss? / Der are explored by Kevin Korsyn in ‘Beyond
Genius! / In seinem Wirken ewig gross!’ Printed Privileged Contexts: Intertextuality, Influence,
in Breidenstein, Festgabe zur Inauguration des and Dialogue’, in Nicholas Cook and Mark
Beethoven-Monuments, pp. 36–7. Everist, eds., Rethinking Music (New York:
34. See Kapp, ‘Autobiographisches von Franz Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 55–72.
Liszt’, p. 11. 10. Hans-Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of
Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis:
3 Liszt and the twentieth century University of Minnesota Press, 1982), and Pierre
1. A number of people provided valuable Bourdieu, ‘The Production of Belief:
assistance with this essay. I am most indebted to ‘Contribution to an Economy of Symbolic
Michael Saffle, whose encyclopedic knowledge Goods’, in Randal Johnson, ed., The Field of
Cultural Production (New York: Columbia Vol. III of the Gregg International reprint
University Press, 1993), pp. 74–111, especially (33 vols., 1966) of the Musikalische Werke, for a
pp. 76–7. discussion of the first collected edition.
11. The argument recently put forward is that 21. Dezsö Legány, ‘Liszt, the Future’s Musician
these composers were striving for the same goals and Man’, Hans Kagebeck and Johan Lagerfelt
as Liszt (above all, dissolution of tonality), and eds., Liszt the Progressive (Lewiston, NY: Edwin
thus they necessarily struck upon the same path. Mellen Press, 2001), p. 116.
Through this reassessment, Liszt may have lost 22. See Imre Sulyok, ‘The New Liszt Edition’,
in influence but gained in the genius of foresight. The New Hungarian Quarterly 22 (1985),
12. See, for example, Detlef Altenburg, ‘Zum pp. 188–9.
Geleit’ and ‘Franz Liszt und das Erbe der 23. The edition became the opportunity for the
Klassik’, in Detlef Altenburg, ed., Liszt und die further politicisation of Liszt: it was made
Weimarer Klassik, in Weimarer Liszt-Studien, possible through a cultural agreement of the two
Vol. I (Laaber: Laaber, 1997), respectively socialist countries, Hungary and the German
pp. 7–8 and 9–32. Although Altenburg does not Democratic Republic. Zoltán Gardonyi,
directly mention the European Union, he is ‘Hauptprobleme der Neuen Liszt-Ausgabe’, in
clearly making a connection between Liszt and Wolfgang Suppau, ed., Liszt-Studien, Vol. I:
political developments in Europe. Kongress-Bericht Eisenstadt 1975 (Graz:
13. Oliver Rathkolb, ‘Zeitgeschichtliche Notizen Academische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, 1977),
zur politischen Rezeption des “europäischen p. 73 and Otto Goldhammer, ‘Die neue
Phänomens Franz Liszt” während der Liszt-Ausgabe. Der kulturelle Beitrag der
nationalsozialistischen Ära’, in Gerhard Deutschen Demokratischen Republik zum
Winckler and J. L Mayer, eds., Liszt heute: Bericht Liszt-Jahr 1961’, Beiträge zur Musikwissenschaft
über das internationale Symposion in Eisenstadt 2 (1960), pp. 69–85.
8.–11. Mai 1986 (Eisenstadt: Burgenländisches 24. Sulyok claims that the New Liszt Edition ‘is
Landesmuseum, 1987), p. 51. the only publication of its kind to have been
14. Dieter Torkewitz, ‘Die neue Musik und das initiated and maintained by a publishing house,
Neue bei Liszt’, Studia Musicologica, 28 (1986), without the financial sponsorship of any
p. 122. See also Otto Kolleritsch, ‘Bemerkungen company or scholarly institution’, ‘The New
zur neuen Liszt-Rezeption’, Musicologica 25 Liszt Edition’, p. 188.
(1983), pp. 141–2. 25. Alan Walker, Review of Franz Liszt: Neue
15. There were at least five reasons for the Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke, Ser. 1: Werke für
‘Nazification’ of Liszt: his friendship with Klavier in 2 Händen, Band 10: Verschiedene
Richard Wagner; his character that displayed zyklische Werke II, Notes 38 (1982), pp. 919–20.
Nazi virtues; his allegedly anti-Semitic views; the 26. Here are the names of the nineteen
‘heroic’ aspects of his music; and his role as composers, all of whom except for Alfred
cultivator and organiser of German musical life. Reisenauer lived well into the twentieth century:
Once ideologists proved his Germanic family Eugène d’Albert, Conrad Ansorge, Richard
roots, his music could be used for propaganda Burmester, Arthur Friedheim, Arthur de Greef,
purposes. Thus the fanfare from Les Préludes was Emma Koch, Frederick Lamond, George
used to introduce ‘Sondermeldungen’ on the Liebling, Sophie Menter, José Vianna da Motta,
radio and the Deutsche Wochenschau. Also, Alfred Reisenauer, Julie Rive-King, Moriz
Joseph Goebbels himself oversaw a thorough Rosenthal, Bertrand Roth, Emil Sauer,
reworking of Les Préludes into a cantata (with Alexander Siloti, Bernhard Stavenhagen, Vera
text) called Lied von Feldzug im Osten, first Timanova, Jozef Weisz. Runolfur Thordarson
performed in June 1941. has evaluated the recorded legacy of these Liszt
16. The emphasis in Hungarian Liszt research of students in detail in his article ‘Recordings of
the 1930s was establishing the Hungarian basis Works of Liszt Played by his Pupils – A
of his life, music and activities. Discography and Evaluation’, Journal of the
17. These observations are based on a study of American Liszt Society 47 (2000), pp. 7–67.
surviving business records preserved in the 27. A number of these students of Liszt,
Staatsarchiv Leipzig. including Mason, Göllerich, Friedheim,
18. James Deaville, ‘The Making of a Myth: Lachmund, Stradal and Siloti, left behind
Liszt, the Press, and Virtuosity’. valuable, detailed accounts of Liszt’s teaching
19. Michael Saffle, ‘Liszt Studies: Past and and master classes. Although the memoirs differ
Present’, in Franz Liszt: A Guide to Research (New in details, they enable a reconstruction of Liszt’s
York: Garland, 1991), pp. 15–19. thoughts and practices as teacher and performer.
20. See Humphrey Searle, ‘The Breitkopf Lina Ramann gathered certain of Liszt’s pieces
Collected Edition of Liszt’s Works’, in Series VII, and edited them with performance instructions
and commentary by students and Liszt himself would play individual movements from sets like
in the invaluable Liszt-Pädagogium (Leipzig: the Transcendental Etudes, the Années de
Breitkopf & Härtel, 1901). pèlerinage or the song transcriptions.
28. Busoni spent so much of his career in 41. Kenneth Hamilton, Liszt: Sonata in B Minor
Germany that most biographical notes make (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
reference to an Italian–German dual national 42. Released by Hyperion over fourteen years
identity. (1985–2000).
29. William W. Austin, Music in the 20th 43. As the first complete recording of the
Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), p. 110. symphonic poems, Bernard Haitink’s set on
30. Marc-André Roberge, ‘The Busoni Network Philips (1969–1971) was a landmark in the
and the Art of Creative Transcription’, Canadian history of Liszt recording, which may well have
University Music Review 11 (1991), p. 70. stimulated research into that body of music.
31. Antony Beaumont, Busoni the Composer 44. Michael Saffle, ‘Liszt und der
(London: Faber and Faber, 1985), p. 21. angelsächsische Raum’, in Liszt heute, p. 147.
32. Roberge, ‘Busoni Network’, p. 70. Busoni Liszt’s symphonic works enjoyed special
tended not to perform paraphrases and popularity in the United States, owing to their
transcriptions in his programmes, in favour of effectively descriptive qualities. See James
‘original’ pieces like the sets mentioned above, Deaville, ‘ ‘‘Westwärts zieht die
the Sonata in B Minor, selections from the Kunstgeschichte’’: Liszt’s Symphonic Poems in
Harmonies poétiques et réligieuses and certain the New World’, in Susan Ingram, Markus
late works, including the Weihnachtsbaum, the Reisenleitner and Cornelia Szabó-Knotik, eds.,
Valses oubliées and Hungarian Rhapsody No. 19. Identität – Kultur – Raum: Kulturelle Praktiken
33. The case of what Kenneth Hamilton calls the und die Ausbildung von Imagined Communities
Liszt–Busoni ‘Figaro Fantasy’ is interesting, in Nordamerika und Zentraleuropa (Vienna:
because, as Hamilton points out, Busoni’s rather Turia & Kant, 2001), pp. 223–43.
far-reaching changes to the score, mainly 45. Danièle Pistone, ‘Liszt et Paris au XXe
excisions, have been overlooked by scholars, Siècle’, in Actes du colloque international Franz
which is a tribute to Busoni’s deft hand at Liszt, La Revue musicale, 405-406-407, Special
editing. See Hamilton, ‘Liszt’s Fantasies – Busoni issue (1986), p. 241.
Excises: The Liszt–Busoni “Figaro Fantasy”’, 46. Regarding Liszt and the ADMV, see James
Journal of the American Liszt Society 30 (1991), Deaville, ‘ ‘‘. . . im Sinne von Franz Liszt . . .’’:
pp. 21–7. Reger and the Allgemeine Deutsche
34. See, for example, ‘Franz Liszts Variante zur Musikverein’, in Alexander Becker, Gabriele
ersten Kollektivausgabe von Fields Nocturnes’, Gefäller and Susanne Popp, eds., Reger-Studien
Die Musik 16 (1924), pp. 309–15 and Daniel 6: Moderne und Tradition, Schriftenreihe des
Raessler, ‘Ferruccio Busoni as Interpreter of Max-Reger-Instituts, Vol. XIII (Wiesbaden:
Liszt,’ Journal of the American Liszt Society 9 Breitkopf & Härtel, 2000), pp. 121–43.
(1981), p. 32. 47. Surprisingly, there exist very few studies
35. Already in 1900, Busoni agitated for a (and no monographs) about the relationship
collected edition containing not only all works, between Strauss and Liszt, perhaps owing to the
but also all of the variant versions of those complexity of the topic.
compositions. See Albrecht Riethmüller, 48. Willi Schuh, Richard Strauss: A Chronicle of
Ferruccio Busonis Poetik, Neue Studien zur the Early Years, 1864–1898, trans. Mary Whittall
Musikwissenschaft, Vol. IV (Mainz: Schott, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982),
1988), p. 96. p. 209.
36. Sitwell, Liszt, p. 180. 49. Charles Youmans, ‘The Letters from
37. Roberge, ‘Busoni Network’, pp. 68–88. Alexander Ritter to Richard Strauss, 1887–1894’,
38. About Sorabji, see Paul Rapoport, ed., Richard Strauss-Blätter 35 (1996), pp. 3–24.
Sorabji: A Critical Celebration (London: 50. Strauss caused a minor scandal by replacing
Scolar Press, 1994). A collection of his essays Brahms’s German Requiem with the Liszt
entitled Around Music (London: Unicorn symphonic poem. See Schuh, Strauss: A
Press, 1932) contains several contributions Chronicle, pp. 159–60.
about Liszt. 51. Michael Walter, Richard Strauss und seine
39. Michael Habermann, ‘Sorabji’s Piano Zeit (Laaber: Laaber, 2000), pp. 86–7.
Music’, Sorabji: A Critical Celebration, p. 340. 52. Regarding the Allgemeiner Deutscher
40. For example, the Great Romantic Festivals Musikverein, see the introductory chapter to
in Hamilton, Ontario of the late 1990s, under Irina Kaminiarz, Richard Strauss: Briefe aus dem
the direction of Alan Walker, would always Archiv des Allgemeinen Deutschen Musikvereins
feature a ‘piano gala’ at which different pianists (1880–1909) (Weimar: Böhlau, 1995).
53. See Detlef Altenburg, ‘Franz Liszt und das Lignée?’, Studia Musicologica 35 (1993–4),
Erbe der Klassik’, p. 24. pp. 221–7.
54. Robert Münster, ed., Jugendstil-Musik? 72. Richard Toop, György Ligeti (London:
Münchner Musikleben 1890–1918 (Wiesbaden: Phaidon Press, 1999), p. 164.
Reichert, 1987). 73. Constantin Floros, György Ligeti: Jenseits von
55. See above all Béla Bartók, ‘Liszt-problémák’, Avantgarde und Postmoderne (Vienna: Lafite,
Nyugat 29 (1936), pp. 24–8. 1996), p. 201.
56. Dezsö Legány, ‘Die jüngere musikalische 74. The ‘hommages à Liszt’ include the
Vergangenheit von Budapest’, Liszt Saeculum, following works: Jeno Takàcs, ‘Le Tombeau de
No. 44 (1990), pp. 3–7. Franz Liszt’ for piano (1979); Frigyes Hidas,
57. For example, the academy library preserved Fantasia per organo: Hommage à Franz Liszt
scores donated by Liszt and offered students a (1984); Manfred Niehaus, ‘Tombeau de Liszt’ for
‘Liszt Stipend’, which Bartók received. See orchestra (1985); Ronald Stevenson, ‘Symphonic
Halsey Stevens, The Life and Music of Béla Elegy for Liszt’ for piano (1986); and York
Bartók, 3rd ed, ed. by Malcolm Gillies (Oxford: Höller, Zweite Sonate für Klavier: Hommage à
Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 12–14. Franz Liszt (1991).
58. Béla Bartók, Jr., ‘Let Us Speak about Liszt’, 75. See Deaville, ‘“. . . im Sinne von Franz
Journal of the American Liszt Society 9 (1981), Liszt . . .”: Reger and the Allgemeine Deutsche
p. 65. Musikverein’.
59. In 1899, Bartók travelled to Budapest to 76. Wolf’s most notorious pronouncement, that
study piano with Liszt pupil István Thomán at ‘there is more intelligence and sensitivity in a
the Academy of Music. single cymbal crash of Liszt’s than in all three of
60. Béla Bartók, ‘Liszt zenéje és a mai közönség’, Brahms’s symphonies’, appeared in an untitled
Népm vel [ü vel] es 6 (1911), pp. 359–62. review in the Wiener Salonblatt of 24 April 1887.
61. Translation by Colin Mason, published in An English translation of the article was
Storm Bull, ‘Recollections: Bartók on Liszt’, published by Henry Pleasants, in The Music
Journal of the American Liszt Society 37 (1995), Criticism of Hugo Wolf (New York: Holmes and
p. 58. Meier Publishers, 1978), pp. 42–6.
62. Béla Bartók, ‘Liszt-problémák’, trans. Andor 77. James Zychowicz, ‘Liszt and Mahler:
C. Klay, Journal of the American Liszt Society 21 Perspectives on a Difficult Relationship’, Journal
(1987), p. 28. of the American Liszt Society 36 (1994), pp. 1–18.
63. Ibid., p. 29. Bartók regarded Liszt’s ‘Jeux 78. Ibid., p. 4. Zychowicz refers to an
d’eau à la Villa d’Este’ (and similar unnamed unpublished letter allegedly from Liszt to
compositions) as essential to the creations of the Mahler, from 1883, in which the writer responds
two ‘French masters’. unfavourably to a submitted manuscript of Das
64. Ibid., p. 30. klagende Lied (p. 4). The letter, preserved in the
65. László Somfai, ‘The Liszt Influence on Mahler–Rosé Collection of the University of
Bartók Reconsidered’, The New Hungarian Western Ontario, is not in Liszt’s hand, however,
Quarterly 27 (1986), pp. 210–19. and it does not correspond in tone to other
66. Somfai, Béla Bartók: Composition, Concepts, assessments by Liszt from the time. This raises
and Autograph Sources (Berkeley: University of the question of how and when Mahler received
California Press, 1996), p. 105. the letter – if the letter is not authentic and yet
67. Stevens, Life and Music of Bartók, p. 110. was a reason for Mahler’s problematic
68. Mária Eckhardt, ‘Liszt’s 125-Year-Old relationship with Liszt, it would be a great
Academy of Music: Antecedents, Influences, tragedy of musical history.
Traditions’, in Mária Eckhardt, ed., Franz Liszt 79. ‘Meine künstlerische Entwicklung’ (1949),
and Advanced Musical Education in Österreichische Musikzeitschrift 24 (1969), p. 282.
Europe, Studia Musicologica 42 (2001), 80. Record jacket note for recordings by the
pp. 109–32. Kolisch Quartet in 1938; see Fred Steiner, ‘A
69. János Breuer, ‘Zoltán Kodály on Liszt’, History of the First Complete Recordings of the
The Liszt Society Journal 42 (1997), Schoenberg String Quartet’, Journal of the Arnold
pp. 9–11. Schoenberg Institute 2 (1978), p. 132.
70. Allen Forte, ‘Liszt’s Experimental Idiom 81. Arnold Schoenberg, ‘Franz Liszts Werk und
and Music of the Early Twentieth Century’, Wesen’, Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 42 (1912),
19th-Century Music 10 (1987), pp. 209–28. pp. 1088–90. However, this article is more about
71. Herman Sabbe has rather unsuccessfully Schoenberg than it is an assessment of Liszt.
attempted to link Liszt with Ligeti through 82. Charles Timbrell, ‘Liszt and French Music’,
language and ideology. See his ‘Qu’est-ce qui Journal of the American Liszt Society 6 (1979),
constitue une “tradition”? Liszt–Ligeti: Une pp. 28–9.
83. Derek Watson, Liszt (New York: Schirmer, 99. Klára Hamburger, Franz Liszt (Budapest:
1989), p. 140. Corvina, 1973).
84. According to Timbrell, ‘Liszt and French 100. Peter Raabe, ‘Vorwort’ to Liszts Leben, in
Music’, p. 33, Ravel worked through Liszt’s Franz Liszt, Vol. I (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1931), [iii].
‘Mazeppa’ and ‘Feux Follets’ in 1917, in 101. This was a decision of Carl Alexander,
order to prepare for writing Le Tombeau de made immediately upon receipt of the news of
Couperin (!). Liszt’s death. See Evelyn Liepsch, ‘Ergebnis der
85. Christian Goubault, ‘Le Centième Nachforschungen: Neue Fragen zur Weimarer
Anniversaire de la naissance de Liszt: Un Nachlaßgeschichte’, in Mária Eckhardt and
génie ignoré ou boycotté en France?’, in Evelyn Liepsch, eds., Franz Liszts Weimarer
Actes du colloque international Franz Liszt, Bibliothek (Laaber: Laaber, 1997), p. 57.
pp. 245–60. 102. She also donated 70,000 Reichsmark to the
86. Danièle Pistone, ‘Liszt et Paris au XXe Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein for the
Siècle’, p. 240. purpose of creating a Franz-Liszt-Stiftung that
87. Konstantin Zenkin, ‘The Liszt Tradition would support young artists and composers (for
at the Moscow Conservatoire’, in Franz Liszt example, Arnold Schoenberg was the recipient
and Advanced Musical Education in Europe, of money from the foundation). Among other
p. 94. projects, the Franz-Liszt-Stiftung sponsored the
88. In some cases, Liszt never met the first collected edition of Liszt’s music. It ceased
individuals, the works of these composers to exist only with the dissolution of the ADMV
coming to his attention through parcels sent by in 1937. See Evelyn Liepsch, ‘Der Nachlaß Franz
the publisher Ivan Bessel. Liszts in Weimar’, in Jochen Golz, ed., Das
89. See, for example, Dorothea Redepenning’s Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv 1896–1996 (Weimar:
work, in particular ‘Liszt und die russische Böhlau, 1996), p. 348.
Symphonik’, in Gerhard Winkler, ed., Liszt und 103. Peter Raabe, ‘Die Entstehungsgeschichte
die Nationalitäten: Bericht über das internationale der Orchesterwerke Franz Liszts’, Ph.D.
musikwissenschaftliche Symposion Eisenstadt, dissertation, University of Jena, 1916.
10.–12. März 1994 (Eisenstadt: Burgenländisches 104. Breitkopf & Härtel were responsible for
Landesmuseum: 1996), pp. 138–50. most of the early publications related to Liszt,
90. Barrie Martyn, Rachmaninoff: Composer, including Ramann’s biography and La Mara’s
Pianist, Conductor (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1990), letters. While Breitkopf was the primary German
p. 326. publisher for musicology at the turn of the
91. Sergei Prokofiev, Prokofiev by Prokofiev: A century, the firm also had a personal reason to
Composer’s Memoir (Garden City, NY: promote Liszt, since it was his publisher for large
Doubleday, 1979), p. 126. projects like the Beethoven symphony
92. Laurel Fay, Shostakovich: A Life (Oxford transcriptions and the symphonic poems.
University Press, 2000), p. 21. 105. Franz Liszt: Briefe an seine Mutter (Leipzig:
93. Ibid., p. 28. Breitkopf & Härtel, 1918).
94. Cited in Vera Stravinsky and Robert Craft, 106. Of course, it also was a matter of claiming
Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents (New York: some of the fame attached to Liszt.
Simon and Schuster, 1978), p. 204. 107. See Saffle, ‘Liszt Studies’, pp. 100–8, for an
95. Cited in David Haas, ‘Sibelius’s Second annotated list of these ‘primary sources’, which
Symphony and the Legacy of Symphonic await serious comparative study.
Lyricism’, in Glenda Goss, ed., The Sibelius 108. Detlef Altenburg, ‘Eröffnungsvortrag: Auf
Companion (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, dem Weg zu einem neuen Liszt-Bild’, in Detlef
1996), p. 79. Altenburg and Gerhard Winkler, eds., Die
96. James Deaville, ‘ ‘‘Westwärts zieht die Projekte der Liszt-Forschung: Bericht über das
Kunstgeschichte’’: Liszt’s Symphonic Poems in internationale Symposion in Eisenstadt 19.–21.
the New World’, pp. 223–43. Oktober 1989 (Eisenstadt: Burgenländisches
97. The three volumes appeared in 1880, 1887 Landesmuseum, 1991), p. 10.
and 1894. Liszt had substantial input into the 109. For a brief overview of Wagner scholarship,
first volume, which he had a chance to see before see the ‘Introduction’ to Michael Saffle’s
it was published. See Deaville, ‘Writing Liszt: meritorious study, Richard Wagner: A Guide to
Lina Ramann, Marie Lipsius, and Early Research (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 3–10.
Musicology’, Journal of Musicological Research 21 Of course, the guide itself is a testimony to the
(2002), pp. 87–90. prodigious research devoted to Wagner.
98. The six volumes appeared between 1880 and 110. About the 1855 catalogue, see Klaus
1883 – Ramann had translated the French Wolfgang Niemöller, ‘Werkbegriff und
writings into German. Werkverzeichnis bei Liszt’, in Altenburg and
Winkler, eds., Die Projekte der Liszt-Forschung, 122. Detlef Altenburg, ‘Eine Theorie der Musik
pp. 37–46. der Zukunft: Zur Funktion des Programms im
111. Chopin, Schumann, Liszt: The New Grove symphonischen Werk von Franz Liszt’, in
Early Romantic Masters I (New York: Norton, Liszt-Studien, Vol. I, pp. 9–25; Norbert Miller,
1985), pp. 322–68. See Rena Charnin Mueller, ‘Musik als Sprache: Zur Vorgeschichte von Liszts
‘Liszt’s Catalogues and Inventories of His Symphonischen Dichtungen’, in Beiträge zur
Works’, Studia Musicologica 34 (1992), musikalischen Hermeneutik (Regensburg: Bosse,
pp. 231–50, for a survey of the catalogues. 1975), pp. 223–87; Dieter Torkewitz,
112. For example, in his study Franz Liszt: Harmonisches Denken im Frühwerk Franz Liszts,
Abstammung, Familie, Begebenheiten (Vienna: in Freiburger Studien zur Musikwissenschaft,
Braumüller, 1937), Liszt’s nephew Eduard von Vol. X (Munich: Katzbichler, 1978).
Liszt produced a detailed and extended 123. Werner Felix, Franz Liszt: Ein Lebensbild;
argument for Liszt’s Germanic roots. Hans-Rudolf Jung, Franz Liszt in seinen Briefen
113. Zoltán Gárdonyi, Die ungarischen (Berlin: Henschel, 1987); Wolfram Huschke,
Stileigentümlichkeiten in den musikalischen Musik im klassischen und nachklassischen
Werken Franz Liszts, Ungarische Bibliothek, 1/16 Weimar (Weimar: Böhlau, 1982).
(Berlin: de Gruyter 1931) and Liszt Ferenc 124. The congress report, consisting of almost
magyar stilusa/La Style hongrois de Franz Liszt, 600 pages (half of them about Liszt), was
Musicologica Hungarica, 3 (Budapest: Az Orsz. published in Budapest in 1963.
Szèchenyi Könyvtár Kiadása, 1936). 125. Bence Szabolcsi, ‘Liszt Ferenc estéje’, in
114. Oliver Rathkolb, ‘Zeitgeschichtliche Zenetudományi Tanulmányok 3 (1955),
Notizen zur politischen Rezeption des pp. 211–65; István Szelenyi, ‘Az ismerleten Liszt’,
“europäischen Phänomens Franz Liszt” Magyar Zene 1 (1961), pp. 11–25; László Somfai,
während der nationalsozialistischen Ära’, p. 48. ‘Liszt Faust-szimfóniájának alakváltásai’, Magyar
115. Correspondance de Liszt et de la comtesse Zene 1 (1961), pp. 559–73 and 78–102; Margit
d’Agoult, ed. by Daniel Ollivier (Paris: Grasset, Prahács, Franz Liszt: Briefe aus ungarischen
1933); Correspondance de Liszt et de sa fille Sammlungen 1835–1886 (Budapest: Akademiai
Madame Ollivier, 1842–1862, ed. by Daniel Kiadó, 1966); Klára Hamburger, Franz Liszt; and
Ollivier (Paris: Grasset, 1933). Dezsö Legány, Liszt Ferenc Magyarországon
116. Emile Haraszti, ‘Liszt à Paris: Quelques 1869–1873 (Budapest: Corvina, 1976).
documents inédits’, Revue musicale 165 (1936), 126. Serge Gut, Franz Liszt: Les Eléments du
pp. 241–58 and 166 (1936), pp. 5–16. langage musical (Paris: Klincksieck, 1975).
117. Michael Saffle, ‘Liszt Studies Past and 127. Reprinted as Ernest Newman, ‘A Study of
Present’, Franz Liszt: A Guide to Research, p. 13. Liszt’, The Liszt Society Journal 8 (1983),
118. Haraszti first wrote about the topic in 1941, p. 33.
but his most important publication about Liszt’s 128. The book remained his only contribution
authorship was ‘Franz Liszt: Author Despite to the Liszt literature.
Himself ’, in Musical Quarterly 33 (1947), 129. New Grove, pp. 263–314 of Vol. V.
pp. 490–516. The Countess Marie d’Agoult and 130. Alan Walker, ed., Franz Liszt: The Man
Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein and His Music (London: Barrie and Jenkins,
substantially contributed to the writings of Liszt 1970).
that appeared during his years respectively in 131. Michael Saffle, ‘Franz Liszt’s
Paris and Weimar. Compositional Development: A Study of the
119. As Werner Felix wrote in 1961, ‘many of Principal Published and Unpublished
the bold, forward-pointing ideas that Liszt said Instrumental Sketches and Revisions’, Ph.D.
or wrote down 100 years ago are finding the dissertation, Stanford University, 1977.
fulfilment just now under the banner of 132. The latter journal began publication in
socialism. In this way, socialist society has not 1972 as the International Liszt Quarterly.
only become the best protector of his artistic After the death of founder Lennart Rabes in
legacy, but also the real executor of his grand 1998, the International Liszt Centre ceased to
thoughts and plans.’ Werner Felix, Franz Liszt: exist.
Ein Lebensbild (Leipzig: Reclam, 1961), p. 214. 133. While there is no such research centre
Translation by the present author. in the United States or England, the Liszt
120. Hans-Rudolf Jung, ‘Liszt-Pflege in der societies of those countries have taken on the
DDR’, Liszt heute, pp. 113–26. roles of the continental research centres.
121. Detlef Altenburg, ‘Schwerpunkte und Nevertheless, the Franz Liszt Studies Series of
Tendenzen der Liszt-Forschung in Deutschland Pendragon Press, edited by Michael Saffle, may
nach 1945’, Liszt heute, p. 88. be the only publisher’s monograph series that is
devoted to Liszt, without an affiliation with a revised paperback edition, published by Cornell
society or research centre. University Press (1987, 1993, 1997).
134. The nine-volume edition began 141. Alan Walker, ed., Franz Liszt: The Man and
publication in 1989 with Vol. IV, Lohengrin et His Music (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1970);
Tannhäuser and Vol. V, Dramaturgische Blätter. Liszt (London: Faber and Faber, 1971); Liszt,
Since then, Die Goethe-Stiftung (Wiesbaden: Carolyne, and the Vatican: The Story of a
Breitkopf & Härtel Vol. III, 1997) and Frühe Thwarted Marriage (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon,
Schriften, (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel Vol. I, 1991); and Living with Liszt, from the Diary of
2000) have appeared in print. Altenburg has Carl Lachmund (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon,
written about Liszt for various publications, but 1995).
his most important activities have been as editor 142. Franz Liszt and Agnes Street-Klindworth: A
and organiser. Correspondence (Hillsdale, NJ: Pendragon,
135. See above all his edited volumes Lohengrin 2000).
et Tannhäuser, and Liszt und die Nationalitäten 143. Derek Watson, Liszt (New York: Schirmer,
(q.v.), as well as articles ‘Liszt’s “Weimar 1989).
Mythology” ’, in Michael Saffle, ed., Liszt and His 144. Adrian Williams, ed., Portrait of Liszt, by
World (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon, 1998), Himself and His Contemporaries (Oxford:
pp. 61–73 and ‘Liszts “An die Künstler” ’, in Liszt Clarendon Press, 1990) and Williams ed. and
und die Weimarer Klassik, pp. 83–99. trans., Selected Letters of Franz Liszt (Oxford:
136. Among her many publications, the Clarendon Press, 1998).
following monographs and editions are 145. See, for example, Hamilton’s
especially important: Franz Liszt und sein Kreis, aforementioned studies of the Liszt–Busoni
in Briefen und Dokumenten aus den Beständen ‘Figaro Fantasy’ and the Sonata in B Minor and
des Burgenländisches Landesmuseums (with Howard’s copious notes to his recordings of the
Cornelia Szabó-Knotik, Eisenstadt: Liszt piano music.
Burgenländischen Landesmuseum, 1983); Franz 146. The first book is published by Garland/
Liszt’s Music Manuscripts in the National Routledge Press, the latter by Pendragon Press.
Széchényi Library, Budapest (Stuyvesant, NY: 147. Suttoni’s Liszt Correspondence in Print first
Pendragon, 1986); Liszt Ferenc hagyatéka a appeared in Fontes Artis Musicae in 1979. A
budapesti. Zenemuvézeti Foiskolán (Budapest: revised edition was published as Vol. 25 of the
Liszt Ferenc Zenemûvészeti Fõiskola, 1986); Journal of the American Liszt Society in 1989 and
Liszt Ferenc vállogatott levelei: ifjúság, virtuóz a supplement to that article also appeared in
évek, Weimar, 1824–1861 (Budapest: JALS, as Vol. 46 (1999). Suttoni also edited and
Zenemükiadó, 1989); and Franz Liszts Weimarer translated the Lettres d’un bachelier ès musique as
Bibliothek (with Evelyn Liepsch, Laaber: Laaber, An Artist’s Journey (Chicago: University of
1999). She has also edited Liszt’s Consolations Chicago Press, 1989).
and Zwei Konzertetüden for Henle in Munich 148. The works list appeared in ‘Franz Liszt’,
(respectively 1992 and 1994). New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians,
137. See among others Mária Eckhardt, rev. edn, Vol. XIV (New York: Macmillan, 2001),
‘Thematic Catalogue of Liszt’s pp. 785–872. The article was written by Alan
Compositions’, Hungarian Musical Quarterly 1 Walker (pp. 755–85 and 872–7).
(1989), pp. 4–7 and ‘The Liszt Thematic 149. Richard Leppert, ‘Cultural Contradiction,
Catalogue in Preparation: Results and Idolatry, and the Piano Virtuoso: Franz Liszt’, in
Problems’, Studia Musicologica 23 (1992), Piano Roles, ed. by James Parakilas (New Haven:
pp. 221–30. Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 252–81, and
138. Published in Studia Musicologica 42 (2001), Lawrence Kramer, ‘Franz Liszt and the Virtuoso
pp. 2–212. Public Sphere: Sight and Sound in the Rise of
139. Dezsö Legány, Franz Liszt: Unbekannte Mass Entertainment’, in Musical Meaning:
Presse und Briefe aus Wien, 1822–1886 Toward a Critical History (Berkeley: University
(Vienna–Budapest: Corvina, 1984) and Klára of California Press, 2001), pp. 68–99.
Hamburger, Franz Liszt: Briefwechsel mit seiner 150. Susan Bernstein, Virtuosity of the
Mutter (Eisenstadt: Bürgenlandisches Nineteenth Century: Performing Music and
Landesmuseum, 2000). Language in Heine, Liszt, and Baudelaire
140. Franz Liszt: Vol. I: The Virtuoso Years (Stanford University Press, 1998); Paul Metzner,
1811–1847 (New York: Knopf, 1983); Vol. II: The Crescendo of the Virtuoso: Spectacle, Skill, and
Weimar Years 1848–1861 (New York: Knopf, Self-Promotion in Paris during the Age of
1989); Vol. III: The Final Years 1861–1886 (New Revolution (Berkeley: University of California
York: Knopf, 1996). Each volume appeared in Press, 1998); and James Deaville, ‘Liszt’s
Virtuosity and His Audience: Gender, Class and 13. Chantavoine, Franz Liszt, pp. 134–5.
Power in the Concert Hall of the Early 19th 14. La Mara, Franz Liszt: Briefe an seine Mutter,
Century’, in Annette Kreutziger-Herr, ed., Das Vol. I, pp. 7–8. In his Liszt biography (London:
Andere. Eine Spurensuche in der Musikgeschichte Dent, 1990, 28) Derek Watson points out that
des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt: Lang, the remark Liszt quotes was in fact made by
1998), pp. 281–300. Correggio, not Michelangelo.
151. The biography appeared as Franz Liszt 15. See Alexander Main, ‘Liszt’s “Lyon”: Music
(Paris: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1989), and it called and the Social Conscience’, in 19th Century
forth a lively exchange in the Journal of the Music 4/3 (1981), pp. 228–43.
American Liszt Society of 1989 and 1991 between 16. See the present author’s ‘ “Not with a Bang
reviewer Alan Walker and author Gut. More but with a Whimper”: The Death of Liszt’s
recently, he co-edited the Sämtliche Schriften Sardanapale’, in The Cambridge Opera Journal
Vol. I (Frühe Schriften) with Rainer Kleinertz 8/1 (1996), pp. 45–58.
(Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 2000) and the 17. Richard Louis Zimdars, trans. and ed., The
Franz Liszt–Marie d’Agoult Correspondence with Piano Masterclasses of August Göllerich, ed.
Jacqueline Bellas (Paris Editions de Fallois: Wilhelm Jerger (Bloomington: Indiana
Fayard, 2001). University Press, 1996), p. 61.
152. See in particular Franz Liszt: la vita, l’opera: 18. For more information on the Liszt Sonata,
i testi musicale (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1983) and its genesis and related works, see my Liszt:
‘Liszt’s “Lieder”: An Essay in Formalization’, in Sonata in B Minor (Cambridge University Press,
Saffle, ed., Liszt and His World, pp. 271–94. 1996), from which some parts of this chapter
153. John Tibbetts, ‘The Truth in Masquerade: have been adapted.
Images of Franz Liszt in the Movies’, in Liszt the 19. Franz Liszt, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Lina
Progressive, p. 222. Ramann (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1880–3),
Vol. II, p. 106.
4. Liszt’s early and Weimar piano works 20. Amy Fay, Music Study in Germany (London:
1. Arthur Friedheim, Life and Liszt: Recollections Macmillan, 1893), p. 198.
of a Concert Pianist, ed. Theodore L. Bullock 21. Berlioz, in Revue et Gazette Musicale 24 (12
(New York: Taplinger, 1961), p. 138. June 1836), p. 200.
2. From a letter of 1868 in Selected Letters of 22. Carl Czerny, The Art of Playing the Ancient
Franz Liszt trans. and ed., Adrian Williams and Modern Pianoforte Works (London: Cocks
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 692–3. and Co., n.d.), p. 3.
3. Helene Raff, ed., ‘Franz Liszt and Joachim 23. Ollivier, ed., Correspondance de Liszt et de la
Raff im Spiegel ihrer Briefe’, Die Musik 1 (1901), comtesse d’Agoult, Vol. I, p. 190.
p. 866. 24. Göllerich, Franz Liszt, p. 184.
4. Friedrich Schnapp, ‘Verschollene 25. Nadine Helbig, ‘Franz Liszt in Rome’, in
Kompositionen Franz Listzs’, in Alfred International Liszt Society Quarterly 15/(16)
Morgenroth, ed., Von Deutscher Tonkunst: (1976), p. 8.
Festschrift zu Peter Raabes 70. Geburtstag 26. Alan Walker, ed. Living with Liszt, from the
(Leipzig: C. F. Peters, 1942), p. 22. Diary of Carl Lachmund (Stuyvesant, NY:
5. La Mara, ed., Franz Liszt: Briefe an seine Pendragon Press, 1995), p. 249.
Mutter (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1918), p. 30. 27. See the present author’s ‘Reminiscences of a
6. August Göllerich, Franz Liszt (Berlin: Scandal – Reminiscences of La Scala: Liszt’s
Marquardt, 1908), p. 298. Fantasy on Mercadante’s Il giuramento’ in The
7. J. d’Ortigue, ‘Franz Lizst’ [sic], in Revue et Cambridge Opera Journal 5/(3) (1993),
Gazette musicale 21 (14 June 1835), p. 201. pp. 187–98.
8. Adrian Williams, Portrait of Liszt by Himself 28. See the present author’s ‘Liszt’s Fantasies –
and His Contemporaries (Oxford: Clarendon Busoni Excises: The Liszt–Busoni “Figaro
Press, 1990), p. 28. Fantasy”’, in The Journal of the American Liszt
9. Daniel Ollivier, ed., Correspondance de Liszt et Society 30 (1991), pp. 21–7.
de la comtesse d’Agoult, Vol. I (Paris: Grasset,
1933), p. 157. 5. Liszt’s late piano works: a survey
10. Jean Chantavoine, Franz Liszt: Pages 1. Letter from Franz Liszt to Marie zu
Romantiques (Paris: F. Alcan, 1912), pp. 135–6. Sayn-Wittgenstein, 26 October 1869, H. E.
11. Robert Schumann, ‘Symphonie Fantastique Hugo, ed., The Letters of Franz Liszt to Marie zu
von Hector Berlioz’, in Neue Zeitschrift für Musik Sayn-Wittgenstein, 1953 (reprint, Westport, CT:
(1835). Greenwood, 1971), p. 141.
12. Hector Berlioz, Literarische Werke, Vol. III 2. Letter to Olga von Meyendorff, 20 November
(Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1904), p. 86. 1875, Villa d’Este, W. R. Tyler, ed., The Letters of
Franz Liszt to Olga von Meyendorff, 1871–1886 FL is much at fault. Stupidly he’s been doing
(Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1979), nothing these last two weeks but blackening
p. 213. music sheets. I’ve been tempted by Petöfi’s
3. Letter to Olga von Meyendorff, 4 February The God of the Magyars. I boldly composed
1876, Villa d’Este, Tyler, Letters of Liszt to von it, then arranged it for the left hand only for
Meyendorff, p. 229. my friend Géza Zichy, and also for both
4. Letter to Walter Bache,19 March 1878, hands for normal pianists. For good
Budapest, La Mara, ed., Letters of Franz Liszt, measure I have also written a Csárdás
trans. Constance Bache, 2 vols. (London: H. Macabre which I shall dedicate to
Grevel, 1894), Vol. II, p. 238. Saint-Saëns. His Danse Macabre is worth
5. Letter to Marianne Brandt, 3 December more and is better, but I want to offer him
1876, La Mara, Letters of Liszt, Vol. II, my Csárdás because of its Hungarian
pp. 310–11. character. (See Tyler, Liszt to von
6. A. Walker, Franz Liszt, 3 vols. (rev. edn, Meyendorff, p. 396.)
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983–96),
17. Liszt, New Edition I/14: xi–xii; and J. Ogdon,
Vol. III, p. 412.
‘Solo Piano Music (1861–86)’, in Alan Walker,
7. Letter to Princess Carolyne von
ed., Franz Liszt: The Man and his Music (New
Sayn-Wittgenstein, 15 June 1877, Weimar, A.
York: Taplinger, 1970), pp. 134–67.
Williams, ed., Franz Liszt: Selected Letters
18. Letter to Princess Carolyne, 30 July 1885,
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 818.
Weimar, Williams, p. 928.
8. Letter to Marie zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, 30 May
19. For a full discussion of Via Crucis, see
1884, Weimar, Hugo, Letters of Liszt to M. zu
pp. 120–6.
Sayn-Wittgenstein, p. 272.
20. See, for instance, J. Baker, ‘The Limits of
9. Letter to Olga von Meyendorff, 26 February
Tonality in the Late Music of Franz Liszt’, Journal
1885, Budapest, Tyler, Letters of Liszt to von
of Music Theory, 34 (1990), pp. 145–74, and A.
Meyendorff, p. 476.
Forte, ‘Liszt’s Experimental Idiom and Music of
10. Letter to Frau Anna Benfey-Schuppe, 11
the Early Twentieth Century’, 19th-Century
November 1880, Villa d’Este, La Mara, Letters of
Music, 10 (1987), pp. 209–28.
Liszt, Vol. II, pp. 368–9.
21. Walker, Liszt, Vol. III, p. 441 n. 11.
11. Letter to Marie d’Agoult, 16 November
22. Ibid., Vol. III, p. 441.
1842, on a steamer from Mainz to Rotterdam,
Williams, p. 188, and fn. 17. Note that the
contents of this letter cast doubt on the date of 6. Liszt’s late piano works: larger forms
1841 conventionally assigned for the 1. Liszt to von Meyendorff, 22 September 1878,
composition of the song. The earliest Villa d’Este, Tyler, Letters of Liszt to Marie von
publications of the work were in 1843; so the Meyendorff, p. 318. The equality of the various
song could well have been composed after this versions of Via Crucis is reflected in a composite
letter was written. manuscript score signed by Liszt and dated
12. Walker, Liszt, Vol. III, p. 317. ‘Budapest 26 Février 79’ (Ms. C, 6a in the
13. Liszt finally published the fourth version in Goethe and Schiller Archives, Weimar)
the 1 October 1883 issue of the Neue containing three versions of the work: (1) vocal
Musikzeitung with the following title: ‘Die Zelle soloist and choir with organ (or piano); (2) solo
in Nonnenwerth-Elegie/ after a poem by Count organ; and (3) solo piano.
Felix Lichnowsky/Last, considerably revised 2. See p. 112.
edition [sehr veränderte Ausgabe].’ It is clear 3. Letter to Princess Carolyne, 1 January 1874,
from the title that he had had his final say on this Pest, Williams, Franz Liszt: Letters, p. 770.
topic. 4. Letter to Olga von Meyendorff, 23 October
14. In a letter to Emile Ollivier, Liszt wrote: ‘The 1878, Rome, Tyler, Liszt to von Meyendorff,
memory I retain of Mme d’Agoult is a secret p. 320.
sadness; I confide it to God, and beseech Him to 5. Walker, Liszt, Vol. III, p. 382.
grant peace and light to the soul of the mother 6. Letter to Ferdinand Taborszky, Music
of my three dear children.’ Quoted in Walker, Publisher in Budapest, 8 June 1885, Antwerp,
Liszt, Vol. III, pp. 317–18. La Mara, Letters of Franz Liszt, Vol. II,
15. Letter to Borodin, Cui, Liadov, and pp. 472–3.
Rimsky-Korsakov, 15 June 1879, Weimar, La 7. Friedheim stated that he orchestrated only
Mara, Letters of Liszt, Vol. II, pp. 353–4. four of the pieces for lack of time to do all seven.
16. In a letter to Olga von Meyendorff See A. Friedheim, ‘Life and Liszt’, in
of 26 February 1881 from Budapest, Liszt Remembering Franz Liszt, 1961 (reprint, New
wrote: York: Limelight, 1986), p. 165.
8. This type of ending is familiar in Liszt’s late up into everlasting life’. See P. Pocknell, ed.,
music. For a thorough analysis of a similar Franz Liszt and Agnes Street-Klindworth: A
ending, see the discussion of Schlaflos! on Correspondence, 1854–1886, Hillsdale, NJ:
pp. 113–16. Pendragon, 2000. p. 9.
9. The original piece on which this composition 22. Vergil [sic], The Aeneid, trans. J. H.
was based, Dem Andenken Petöfis, begins in E Mantinband (New York: Ungar, 1964).
minor and ends definitively in E major (on an 23. My thanks to Michael Hendry of North
E-major sixth chord with G in the upper voice). Yarmouth Academy (Maine, USA) and director
For the Historical Portraits Liszt added the of the Propertius website
introduction and close, and also incorporated (http://www.curculio.org) for his translation
numerous repetitions of phrases that appear and the following explication of Propertius’ text
only once in the original: bars 20, 27, 32, 37–9, (in a personal communication). In Propertius’
54, 56, 58, and 60 of the version in Historical poem, the poet addresses Augustus in
Portraits. self-deprecating flattery in order to get out of his
10. Williams, Franz Liszt: Letters, pp. 927–8. It obligation to write an epic. He claims to be
would appear that at this time he had not settled incapable of such great work, offering to provide
on the ordering of the pieces in the set, although instead what little he can. Liszt would certainly
he might have decided on using ‘Széchenyi’ and not have intended any of the irony contained in
‘Mosonyi’ as opening and closing numbers. the original poetry. Indeed, he may well have
11. Letter to Princess Carolyne, 15 June 1877, identified with both the poet and the dead
Weimar, Williams, Franz Liszt: Letters, p. 818. Emperor, his dedicatee. Liszt, too, felt the pain of
Liszt had set this text to begin Part III of not accomplishing all he would have wished.
Christus. 24. Letter to Lina Ramann, 22 February 1883,
12. Letter to Princess Carolyne, 23 September Budapest, La Mara, Liszt, Vol. II, pp. 431–2.
1877, Villa d’Este, Williams, Liszt: Letters, p. 821. 25. Letter to Princess Carolyne, 30 July 1885,
13. Letter to Olga von Meyendorff, 27 Weimar, Williams, Franz Liszt: Letters,
September 1877, Villa d’Este, Tyler, Liszt to von pp. 927–8. The full quotation is given on p. 132.
Meyendorff, p. 293. 26. Franz Liszt, New Edition of the Complete
14. Letter to Olga von Meyendorff, 14 October Works, ed. I. Sulyok and I. Mezö (Kassel:
1877, Villa d’Este, Tyler, Liszt to von Meyendorff, Bärenreiter, 1970–), I, 8, xi.
pp. 294–5. 27. Letter to Olga von Meyendorff, 14 October
15. Ibid. 1877, Villa d’Este, Tyler, Liszt to von Meyendorff,
16. Letter to Princess Carolyne, 4 February p. 294.
1883, Budapest, Williams, Franz Liszt: Letters, 28. In a letter to Olga von Meyendorff, 26
p. 896; postscript to undated letter to Olga von December 1879, Villa d’Este [Tyler, Liszt to von
Meyendorff, March 1878?, Tyler, Liszt to von Meyendorff, p. 363], Liszt wrote: ‘I’m so weary
Meyendorff, p. 313. and even so harassed by the music I am writing,
17. Walker, Liszt, Vol. III, p. 394. while composing it, revising the copy and the
18. Letter to Olga von Meyendorff, 13 proofs, that afterwards I don’t like to talk about
September 1877, Rome, Tyler, Liszt to von it.’
Meyendorff, p. 292. 29. Letter to Princess Carolyne, 23 September
19. Walker, Liszt, Vol. I, pp. 367–8. The Lorelei, 1877, Villa d’Este, Williams, Franz Liszt: Letters,
according to legend, was a lovely maiden p. 821.
chained to a promontory overlooking the Rhine, 30. Letter to Olga von Meyendorff, 27
from which she lured sailors to their deaths. For September 1877, Villa d’Este, Tyler, Liszt to von
a discussion of the significance of Nonnenwerth, Meyendorff, p. 293.
see pp. 97–8. 31. British Museum, London, shelf mark: ADD
20. Perhaps not coincidentally, Liszt’s song ‘Die 34 182. This autograph is labelled source F by
Lorelei’ also features the chromatic relation the editors in Liszt, New Edition of the Complete
A-B, but in the context of the key of G. The key Works, Vol. I, 8, 48.
of E appears in the song to set the first verse, 32. One recognises that the chiastic concept is
depicting the peaceful scene before the siren also the basis for Liszt’s final cyclic work, the
employs her wiles. Historical Hungarian Portraits. The central
21. This passage was one of Liszt’s favourites. In movement of this set, however, is the rather
a letter to Agnes Street-Klindworth of 12 April devilish ‘Teleki’, causing one to wonder whether,
1855, Weimar, Liszt made a direct connection by analogy to Liszt’s successor Skryabin, this
between the symbol of the water and the art of latter set is Liszt’s equivalent of a ‘Black Mass’
music, which he called ‘the tangent of the composition, as compared with the ‘White Mass’
infinite: the living water which, like love, springs celebrated in Années III.
7. Liszt’s piano concerti: a lost tradition 13. See Rosenblatt, ‘Concerto as Crucible’,
1. José Vianna da Motta, Ferruccio Busoni’s pp. 241–3, who speculates that the ending would
Cyclus von vier Clavier-Orchester-Abenden have been dramatic and quite virtuosic.
(Berlin: Concert-Directionen Hermann Wolff, 14. Lindeman, Structural Novelty and Tradition,
1898), 9 and 11. All translations are mine unless p. 175.
noted otherwise. 15. Franz Liszt, Briefe an seine Mutter (Leipzig:
2. August Riessmann, Musikalisches Breitkopf & Härtel, 1918), p. 21.
Conversations-Lexikon: Eine Encyklopädie der 16. For a detailed description of the reviews see
gesammten musikalischen Wissenschaften für Rosenblatt, ‘Concerto as Crucible’, 276–88.
Gebildete aller Stände (Berlin: R. Oppenheim, 17. Weimar: Goethe–Schiller Archive, Liszt
1880–2). Collection: H5c (orchestral parts dated ‘Gombo,
3. Leon Botstein, ‘The Concerto – the 19th 13 Sept 39’) and H5d (piano part).
Century’, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and 18. NZfM, Bd. 4, No. 29 (8 April 1836),
Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: pp. 122–4. And in an essay published in Bd. 10,
Macmillan, 2002). No. 2 (4 January 1839), pp. 5–6, Schumann
4. Stephan D. Lindeman, Structural Novelty and wrote: ‘The Scherzo . . . would it not be an
Tradition in the Early Romantic Piano Concerto effective addition to the concerto?’
(Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1999), 19. Liszt, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Lina
Michael Thomas Roeder, A History of the Ramann (Leipzig, 1880–3), Vol. II, p. 106.
Concerto (Portland: Amadeus Press, 1994), Jay 20. Adrian Williams, Portrait of Liszt: By Himself
Michael Rosenblatt, ‘The Concerto as Crucible: and his Contemporaries (Oxford: Clarendon
Franz Liszt’s Early Works for Piano and Press, 1990), pp. 50 and 72.
Orchestra’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of 21. Roeder, History of the Concerto, p. 246.
Chicago, 1995), Michael Steinberg, The 22. Steinberg, The Concerto, 241. As Kenneth
Concerto: A Listener’s Guide (Oxford: Oxford Hamilton notes in Liszt: Sonata in B Minor
University Press, 1998). (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),
5. Rosenblatt, ‘The Concerto as Crucible’, 6. p. 11, although numerous fantasies, for example
6. La Mara [Marie Lipsius], Classisches und those by Beethoven, Hummel, or Kalkbrenner,
Romantisches aus der Tonwelt (Leipzig: Breitkopf were ‘composed of short, contrasting sections in
& Härtel, 1892), 260. The letter is also quoted in a variety of keys and tempi’, Schubert followed a
Julius Kapp, Franz Liszt (Berlin and Leipzig: more complex plan, ‘using thematic
Schuster & Loeffler, 1909), 31–2; and Rosenblatt, transformation to link sections together in a
‘Concerto as Crucible’, 165. scheme of first section (C major), slow section
7. Weimar: Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv, MS (C-E major), scherzo (A major) and finale (C
Z18, no. 30 and MS Z31, no.10. See Rosenblatt, major beginning with a fugal exposition)’.
‘Concerto as Crucible’, 173–87. 23. In a letter to Carl Alexander of Weimar
8. Ignaz Moscheles, Aus Moscheles’ Leben: Nach dated October 1846 Liszt wrote: ‘The time has
Briefen und Tagebüchern herausgegeben von come for me to break my virtuoso chrysalis and
seiner Frau (Leipzig: Dunker und Humblot, give full flight to my thoughts.’ Cf. La Mara, ed.,
1872–3), vol. I, 138; article in The Morning Post Letters of Franz Liszt, trans. Constance Bache
on 11 June 1827 quoted in William Wright, (London, 1894), vol. I, p. 106.
‘Liszt’s 1827 Concert Appearances in London: 24. Alfred Brendel, ‘Musical Thoughts and
Reviews, Notices, Playbills, and Programs’, Afterthoughts’ (London: Robson Books, 1976),
Journal of the American Liszt Society 29 (1991), pp. 79–80.
p. 65. 25. Weimar: Goethe–Schiller Archive, Liszt
9. Sketchbook N6 is described in Keith T. Johns, Collection: H3a (autograph for Concerto No. 1);
‘Franz Liszt’s N6 Sketchbook Held at the H5a (autograph for Concerto No. 2, orchestral
Goethe–Schiller Archive in Weimar’, Journal of part, dated ‘5 May 1849’) and H5b (autograph
the American Liszt Society 20 (December 1986), for Concerto No. 2, piano part).
pp. 30–3 and Rosenblatt, ‘Concerto as Crucible’, 26. Rosenblatt, ‘Concerto as Crucible’, pp. 3–4.
pp. 40–1. 27. It is interesting to note that Liszt saw his
10. For transcriptions and a more detailed quest for creative growth as being parallel to that
description of these sketches see Rosenblatt, of Beethoven, as shown in a letter to Wilhelm
‘Concerto as Crucible’, pp. 226–31. von Lenz dated 2 December 1852: ‘Were it my
11. Robert Bory, ‘Diverses lettres inédites de place to categorise the different periods of the
Liszt’, Schweizerisches Jahrbuch für great master’s symphonies and quartets, I should
Musikwissenschaft 3 (1928), p. 10. certainly . . . divide his work . . . into two
12. Weimar: Goethe–Schiller Archive, Liszt categories: the first, that in which traditional and
Collection: H3b, H3c. recognized form contains and governs the
thought of the master, and the second, that in (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996),
which the thought stretches, breaks, recreates pp. 126–8.
and fashions the form and style according to its 11. Walker, Living with Liszt, p. 156.
needs and inspirations.’ (La Mara, vol. I, 12. Ibid., p. 35.
pp. 151–2). 13. Williams: Portrait of Liszt, p. 557.
28. For a detailed description of the sources, 14. Ibid. pp. 561–2.
evolution, and programmatic layout of Liszt’s 15. Adrian Williams: Liszt: Selected Letters of
Totentanz see: Anna Harwell Celenza, ‘Death Franz Liszt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998),
Transfigured: the Origins and Evolution of p. 256.
Franz Liszt’s Totentanz’, Nineteenth-Century 16. Reprinted for the centenary of Liszt’s death
Music: Selected Proceedings of the Tenth with a new foreword by Alfred Brendel
International Conference, ed. Jim Samson and (Wiesbaden, 1986).
Bennett Zon (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 17. Tilly Fleischmann, Aspects of the Liszt
pp. 125–54. Tradition, ed. Michael O’Neill (Cork: Adore
29. Weimar: Goethe–Schiller Archive, Liszt Press, 1986).
Collection: N1. For a fuller discussion of this 18. Walker, Living with Lizst, p. 224.
notebook see Rena Mueller, ‘Liszt’s “Tasso” 19. Zimdars, Piano Masterclasses, p. 140.
Sketchbook: Studies in Sources and Revisions’, 20. Ibid., p. 116.
(Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1986), 21. Williams, Portrait of Liszt, p. 287.
p. 149 n. 67. 22. Walker, Living with Liszt, p. 149.
30. In 1919 Busoni published an edition of 23. Zimdars, Piano Masterclasses, p. 58.
Totentanz that purported to be the ‘first version 24. Walker, Living with Liszt, p. 234.
completed on 21 October 1849’, but a study of 25. Ibid., p. 53.
the manuscripts shows that the version he 26. Ibid., p. 234.
published was actually the one completed in 27. Ibid., pp. 210 and 271.
1853. 28. Ibid., p. 33.
31. English translation taken from The Dance of 29. Ibid., p. 324.
Death by Hans Holbein, ed. Frederick Evans 30. Ibid., p. 194.
(London, 1916). 31. Ibid., p. 14.
32. Vladimir Vasilevich Stasov, Selected Essays 32. Ibid., p. 214.
on Music, trans. Florence Jonas (London: Barrie 33. Zimdars, Piano Masterclasses, p. 134.
& Rockliffe Cresset Press, 1968), p. 50. 34. Ibid., p. 87.
35. Ibid., p. 140.
8. Performing Liszt’s piano music 36. Ibid., p. 87.
1. Mrs W. Chanler, Roman Spring (Boston, 37. Walker, Living with Liszt, p. 271.
1934), quoted from Adrian Williams, A Portrait 38. Zimdars, Piano Masterclasses, p. 19.
of Liszt by Himself and his Contemporaries 39. Lina Ramann, Liszt Pädagogium, Serie 2,
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 3.
p. 552. 40. Walker, Living with Liszt, p. 275.
2. La Mara, ed. [Marie Lipsius], Franz Liszts 41. Zimdars, Piano Masterclasses, p. 22.
Briefe (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1893–1905), 42. Ibid., p. 21.
Vol. VIII, p. 161. 43. Williams, Portrait of Liszt, p. 291.
3. Charles Suttoni, Franz Liszt: An Artist’s 44. Walker, Living with Liszt, p. 151.
Journey. Lettres d’un bachelier ès Musique 45. Zimdars, Piano Masterclasses,
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989), p. 31. p. 141.
4. Williams, Portrait of Liszt, pp. 41–2. 46. Walker, Living with Liszt, p. 308.
5. Ibid., pp. 17–18. 47. Paderewski’s recording of La Leggierezza,
6. Ibid., p. 136. however, is one of the finest examples of Liszt
7. Ibid., p. 135. playing ever recorded and his jeu perle seems to
8. Heard in 1858 by the composer Wendelin sum up many of Liszt’s general injunctions on
Weissheimer. See Williams, Portrait of Liszt, beauty, lucidity and evenness of tone.
p. 342.
9. Alan Walker, ed., Living with Liszt from the 9. Liszt’s Lieder
Diary of Carl Lachmund, an American pupil of 1. Michael Saffle, Franz Liszt: A Guide to
Liszt, 1882–84 (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Research (New York and London: Garland,
Press, 1995), pp. 134–5. 1991), p. 307.
10. Richard Zimdars, trans. and ed., The Piano 2. Francis Hueffer, ‘Liszt’, in Dictionary of Music
Masterclasses of Franz Liszt, 1884–6. Diary notes and Musicians, ed. Sir George Grove (London:
of August Göllerich, Edited by Wilhelm Jerger Macmillan, 1880), Vol. II, p. 148.
3. Hueffer, ‘Liszt’, p. 148. 5. Alan Walker, Franz Liszt: The Weimar Years,
4. Eduard Hanslick, Aus meinem Leben, Vol. II 1848–1861 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
(Berlin: Allgemeiner Verlag für Deutsche 1989), pp. 119–20.
Literatur, 1894), p. 189. 6. Franz Liszt, Preface to Tasso: Lamento e
5. Adrian Williams, Portrait of Liszt (Oxford: Trionfo; English trans. Humphrey Searle
Clarendon, 1990), p. 568. (London: Eulenburg, 1976), pp. iii–vii.
6. La Mara [Pseud. Marie Lipsius] (ed.), Franz 7. See Richard Kaplan, ‘Sonata Form in the
Liszt’s Briefe (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, Orchestral Works of Liszt: The Revolutionary
1893–1905), Vol. IV, pp. 38–9. Reconsidered’, 19th-Century Music 8/(2) (Fall
7. George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of 1984), pp. 142–52.
Language and Translation (Oxford University 8. Translation by Ralph Nash in Torquato Tasso,
Press, 1975), p. 420. Jerusalem Delivered (Detroit: Wayne State
8. Steiner, After Babel, p. 422. University Press, 1987). Other authors also
9. La Mara (ed.), The Letters of Franz Liszt, commented on the gondoliers singing Tasso,
trans. Constance Bache (New York: Scribner’s, including Madame de Stäel in Corinne.
1894), Vol. I, pp. 413–14. 9. Douglass Seaton, ‘Interpreting Schubert’s
10. La Mara, Franz Liszts Briefe, Vol. IV, p. 89. Heine Songs’, The Music Review 53 (May 1992),
11. La Mara, The Letters of Franz Liszt, Vol. II, p. 98.
p. 502. 10. Albert Joseph George, Pierre-Simon
12. Letter of Liszt to Marie d’Agoult, 8 October Ballanche: Precursor of Romanticism (Syracuse,
1846, quoted in Adrian Williams (ed. and NY: Syracuse University Press, 1945), pp. 95–6.
trans.), Franz Liszt: Selected Letters (Oxford: 11. George, Pierre-Simon Ballanche, pp. 119–42.
Clarendon, 1998), p. 238. 12. Jeanne Pohl was the wife of Richard Pohl.
13. Letter of Liszt to Giuseppe Ferrazzi, May 13. See Paul Allen Bertagnolli, ‘From Overture
1880, quoted in Williams, Franz Liszt: Selected to Symphonic Poem, From Melodrama to
Letters, p. 852. Choral Cantata: Studies of the Sources for Franz
14. Performed on 24 July 1886 by his pupil Liszt’s Prometheus and his Chöre zu Herder’s
Bernhard Stavenhagen in the house in Bayreuth Entfesselte Prometheus’, Ph.D. diss., Washington
in which Liszt lived out his last few days. See Alan University, 1998.
Walker (ed.), The Death of Franz Liszt, Based on 14. Wulf Koepke refers to Herder’s dramatic
the Diary of his Pupil Lina Schmalhausen works as Festspiele that draw on the tradition of
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 61. the cantata, oratorio, monodrama, and allegory.
15. Richard Louis Zimdars (ed. and trans.) Herder’s artistic goal was a public-minded
The Piano Master Classes of Franz Liszt, Gesamtkunstwerk – a Festspiel employing all the
1884–1886: Diary Notes of August Göllerich, arts to celebrate a communal spirit and
Edited by Wilhelm Jerger (Bloomington and informed by his moral and philosophical
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), concerns. Wulf Koepke, Johann Gottfried Herder
p. 48. (Boston, MA: Twayne, 1987), p. 114.
16. Adrian Williams, Portrait of Liszt, p. 460. 15. Richard Pohl, Prologues to Franz Liszt,
17. Adrian Williams, Liszt: Selected Letters Chöre zu Herders ‘Der entfesselte Prometheus’
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 417. (Leipzig: C. F. Kahnt Nachfolger, 1874), p. 4.
16. In the Prologues Pohl emphasised how
10. Liszt’s symphonic poems and symphonies Prometheus was not afraid of the wrath of Zeus.
1. Wagner to Liszt, London, 7 June 1855, Of course, later on in the drama Prometheus
Sämtliche Briefe, vol. VI: January 1854–February refuses a false gift from the gods presented by
1855, ed. Johannes Forner (Leipzig: VEB Hermes, for he will not allow his fate nor the fate
Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1986), 203; of mankind to be tainted by the gods.
Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, ed. 17. See Seaton, ‘Interpreting Schubert’s Heine
W. Ashton Ellis (New York: Greenwood Press, Songs’, p. 98.
1969), pp. 91–2. 18. See Kenneth Hamilton, ‘Liszt’, in The
2. Alan Walker, Franz Liszt: Virtuoso Years, Nineteenth-Century Symphony, ed. D. Kern
1811–1847 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, Holoman (New York: Schirmer, 1997), p. 145 for
1983), p. 370. this reference.
3. Detlef Altenburg, ‘Franz Liszt and the Legacy 19. See Andrew Bonner, ‘Liszt’s Les Préludes and
of the Classical Era’, 19th-Century Music 18(1) Les Quatre Élémens: A Reinvestigation’,
(Summer 1994), pp. 47–8. 19th-Century Music 10(2) (1986), p. 98 for a
4. Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein worked detailed chronological chart of the progression
closely with Liszt on the creation of the from the choral work to the symphonic
Prefaces. poem.
20. See Vera Micznik, ‘The Absolute Limitations Daniel Stern [pseud.], ed. Daniel Ollivier (Paris,
of Programme Music: The Case of Liszt’s Die 1927), 180; quoted in Sharon Winklhofer, ‘Liszt,
Ideale’, Music and Letters 80 (1999), pp. 207–40 Marie d’Agoult, and the Dante Sonata’,
for an in-depth discussion of this piece. 19th-Century Music 1 (July 1977), p. 27.
21. See Walker, The Weimar Years, p. 70 fn 26. 36. Liszt to Berlioz, San Rossore, 2 October
22. Letter to August von Trefort, Budapest, 1 1839; Gazette musicale, 24 October 1839, p. 418;
March 1876, Franz Liszts Briefe, ed. La Mara An Artist’s Journey: Lettres d’un bachelier ès
[Marie Lipsius] (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, musique, 1835–1841. Trans. and ed. Charles
1893–1905), Vol. II, p. 293. Suttoni (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
23. Bence Szabolsci, A Concise History of 1989), p. 186.
Hungarian Music (Budapest: Corvina, 1974), 37. Walker, Weimar Years, pp. 50, 260.
p. 63. 38. Liszt to Wagner (Weimar, 2 June 1855)
24. Szabolsci, Hungarian Music, p. 63. Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, ed.
Szabolsci also points out that a collected edition W. Ashton Ellis (New York: Greenwood Press,
of Rózsavölgyi’s works was begun in 1969), p. 89.
1844. 39. Pagan philosophers and other souls who
25. Kenneth Hamilton reminds us that Lina have not been baptised inhabit the first circle of
Ramann recounts which scenes from the play are Hell, Limbo. Their souls live in a castle and
depicted in the music. Lina Ramann, Lisztiana, wander around in a fresh meadow, and, even
ed. Arthur Seidl (Mainz: Schott, 1983), 258; though they are without hope, their intellectual
Hamilton, ‘Liszt’, in The Nineteenth-Century torment does not evoke fear like the physical
Symphony, ed. D. Kern Holoman (New York: punishments described in the rest of the circles.
Schirmer, 1997), p. 145. Liszt’s depiction of Hell, therefore, begins with
26. Ibid. the circle of the lustful, who are actively guilty
27. Keith Johns, The Symphonic Poems of Franz of sin.
Liszt (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1997), 40. Liszt, Dante Symphony (Budapest: Editio
pp. 71–2. Musica, 1970); rpt. (London: Ernst Eulenburg),
28. Humphrey Searle, The Music of Franz Liszt, p. 68; ‘Diese ganze Stelle als ein lästerndes
2nd ed (New York: Dover, 1966), p. 77. Hohngelächter aufgefaßt, sehr scharf markiert in
29. Searle, The Music of Franz Liszt, p. 78. den beiden Klarinetten und den Violen.’
30. See Kaplan, ‘Sonata Form in the Orchestral
Works of Liszt’, pp. 142–52. 11. Liszt’s sacred choral music
31. According to Searle, the first motive ‘might 1. Many of Liszt’s sacred choral works are
be said to represent the mystical and magical available in a modern edition in Franz Liszt:
element in Faust’s nature’ while the second Muskalische Werke, ed. F. Busoni, P. Raabe, P.
motive ‘generally represents Faust’s emotional Wolfrum et al. (Leipzig, 1907–36) [hereafter
character, whether passionate, amorous, or MW] V/5–7. In some cases, a work is available
melancholy’. ‘Franz Liszt’ in The Symphony, vol. only in the original publication. The only major
I, ed. Robert Simpson (New York: Drake, 1972), study of Liszt’s sacred choral music is Paul
p. 265; Alan Walker agrees with Searle that M1 Merrick, Revolution and Religion in the Music of
represents Faust as a magician; however, he Liszt (Cambridge University Press, 1987).
interprets M2 as Faust the Thinker, The Weimar 2. The work list by Rena Charnin Mueller and
Years, p. 329. Maria Eckhardt in the 2003 on-line version of
32. Lawrence Kramer, ‘Liszt, Goethe, and the The New Grove Dictionary (hereafter NGD)
Discourse of Gender’, in Music as Cultural suggests some revisions to the dates of
Practice, 1800–1900 (Berkeley: University of composition given by Humphrey Searle/Sharon
California Press, 1990), pp. 108, 115. Winklhofer in the 1982 NGD edition. The
33. Mephistopheles: ‘I am the spirit which revision of the conception date generally
eternally denies!’ (Ich bin der Geist, der stets involves only a year or two, in several cases four
verneint!) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: to five years, and in the case of Psalm 116 and of
A Tragedy, trans. Walter Arndt, ed. Cyrus Der Herr bewahret die Seelen seiner Heiligen,
Hamlin (New York: Norton, 1976), Vol. I, more than fifteen. I have given dates prefaced by
p. 1338. circa to account for some of the minimal
34. ‘Alles Vergängliche/ist nur ein Gleichnis,/das discrepancies. When the redating is more
Unzulängliche/hier wird’s Ereignis,/das substantial, I acknowledge when I have adopted
Unbeschreibliche/hier ist’s getan./Das it or the possibility of a changed conception date
Ewig-Weibliche/zieht uns hinan.’ in an accompanying note.
35. Liszt, ‘Journal des Zÿi’, in [Marie de 3. Quoted in Merrick, Revolution and Religion,
Flavigny, Comtesse D’Agoult], Mémoires par p. 11.
4. Quoted in Merrick, Revolution and Religion, 14. For Psalm 13 I have used dates from NGD
pp. 18–19. worklist which acknowledges two versions,
5. Franz Liszt, Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Detlef whereas Searle does not.
Altenburg (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, c. 15. Liszt unifies the work additionally by having
1989–), Vol. I, ed. Rainer Kleinertz, p. 58: ‘la the melody at letter G return intact at letter Q,
musique doit s’enquérir du peuple et de dieu; and that of letter O at fourteen bars after Y.
aller de l’un à l’autre; améliorer, moraliser, Opening as these two melodies do with a
consoler l’homme, bénir et glorifier Dieu’. In descending fifth and descending sixth
1836 Liszt, Marie d’Agoult and George Sand respectively, one might relate them to Liszt’s
spent a two-and-a-half months period in Paris main motive, although only loosely and not as
writing articles for Lamennais’s newspaper Le transformations per se.
Monde. The focus of these articles was the 16. A second version dating c. 1859–62 was
subject of humanitarian art. Merrick, Revolution never published.
and Religion, p. 23. 17. In ‘Program and Hungarian Idiom in the
6. Sämtliche Schriften, Vol. I, 58: ‘les beaux Sacred Music of Liszt’, Michael Saffle and James
chants de la révolution’. In fact, Liszt had Deaville, eds. New Light on Liszt and His Music.
sketched a Revolutionary Symphony in 1830 in Essays in Honor of Alan Walker’s 65th Birthday,
reaction to the Paris revolution that year; he Analecta Lisztiana II (NY: Pendragon Press,
incorporated into it the Marseillaise. 1997), pp. 239–51, Klára Hamburger overviews
7. De profundis was also used in the middle of occurrences of this scale in Liszt’s sacred music.
the piano piece Pensée des morts, itself a 18. Liszt has the dynamics diminish from p to
reworking of the piano piece Harmonies pppp, and includes the remark: NB. Die 6 letzten
poétiques et religieuses of 1833–4. Pensée was Takte in den Singstimmen immer schwächer und
eventually incorporated into Liszt’s piano cycle gänzlich verhallend – (ohne Athem zu holen).
Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, published in 19. MW V/7 labels the version for mixed chorus
1853. See note 10. I and that for men’s chorus II, as does Searle.
8. Searle’s catalogue numbers for the two NGD calls the men’s version I and the mixed
versions of Ave Maria I are S20/1 and 20/2; NGD chorus version II. In the absence of an
worklist calls them J1, first and second version. explanation for the changed numbering, I have
With respect to Pater noster, MW V/6 labels the followed the MW labelling.
1852 version Pater noster II. Searle accordingly 20. The organ score contains Liszt’s ideas for
calls both early versions Pater noster II (S21/1 woodwind, brass, and timpani parts. Raff
and 21/2). NGD work list calls them Pater noster created an orchestral version for publication.
I, J3, first and second version. Both are found in MW V/5.
9. The third statement begins with dona nobis 21. Letters of Franz Liszt, trans. Constance Bache,
pacem instead of Agnus Dei, thereby shortening 2 vols. (London: 1894; reprinted New York,
the whole. Greenwood Press, 1969) [hereafter L I or II].
10. Liszt also began a piano version of Hymne in 22. This is the same motive that returns in the
1847, later incorporated into his piano cycle dona nobis pacem section of the Agnus.
entitled Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, 23. Liszt’s Gran Mass is discussed by Helmut
published in 1853. Loos, ‘Franz Liszts Graner Festmesse’,
11. Carl Dahlhaus, ‘Liszt: Mazeppa’, Analyse und Kirchenmusikalisches Jahrbuch 67 (1983),
Werturteil. Pädagogik 8 (1970), pp. 86–7; pp. 45–59.
Dolores Pesce, ‘Expressive Resonance in Liszt’s 24. Liszt’s idea for the work may have originated
Piano Music’, R. Larry Todd, ed., as early as 1839 when he published an article in
Nineteenth-Century Piano Music (New York: the Gazette musicale entitled ‘La Sainte Cécile de
Schirmer Books, 1990), pp. 369–70. Raphaël’, reprinted in Sämtliche Schriften, Vol. I,
12. Nos. 1–4 are for four mixed voices, no. 5 for pp. 296–301. Although the music’s title is in
three equal voices. German, he set the original French text first,
13. Liszt did not consistently follow one psalm adding on staves below it a setting in Italian and
numbering system. For psalms 13, 23, 137, he one in German.
used the Hebrew numbering. For Psalms 18, 25. The scoring is for mezzo-soprano solo,
116, and 129 he used the Greek numbering; to chorus ad lib., with orchestra or piano,
these I have added the Hebrew numbering harmonium, and harp.
(1 higher) in parentheses. In the cases where he 26. After the soloist presents verse 12, Liszt
set a psalm text but did not include the psalm largely recaps verses 10–12 for the chorus.
number in the title, I have referred to the 27. The scoring is for soprano, alto, three
psalm text by the Hebrew numbering baritone, and bass solos, chorus, orchestra, and
system. organ.
28. The Letters of Franz Liszt to Olga von 40. NGD worklist suggests it may have been
Meyendorff 1871–1886, trans. William R. Tyler, conceived as early as 1849.
introd. and notes by Edward N. Waters 41. BR VI, 179–80: ‘Je ne le voulais ni trop
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, reposé, ni trop agité – simple et abondant,
1979), p. 347. tendre et grave, ardent et chaste, tout ensemble!’
29. Briefe hervorragender Zeitgenossen an Franz 42. NGD worklist gives dates of 1859–65.
Liszt, ed. La Mara [Marie Lipsius] (Leipzig: 43. It appears in the dona nobis pacem section of
Breitkopf & Härtel, 1895–1904), p. 72; and the Agnus Dei.
Correspondance: Lettres choisis, ed. 44. Franz Liszt’s Briefe an Baron Anton Augusz,
Pierre-Antoine Huré and Claude Knepper 1846–1878, ed. Wilhelm von Csapó (Budapest:
(Paris: Jean-Claude Lattès, 1987), pp. 453–4. [F. Kilian’s nachf.], 1911)[hereafter LAA], 101:
30. The folk hymn occurs on p. 240 of the Kahnt ‘de m’en montrer digne comme catholique,
full score, thirty bars before cue T in section 5. comme hongrois et compositeur’.
In the endnotes to the published edition, Liszt 45. LAA, p. 131.
credits various Hungarian individuals who 46. The Credo is taken from Dumont’s Messe
provided him with antiphons, graduals, hymns, royale. Liszt added an organ accompaniment
etc. which are preserved in the Feast of St and has the full choir sing in unison except for
Elisabeth and in breviaries and chant books of brief passages in thirds at letters C and F and at
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. some cadences.
31. The tune occurs on p. 30 of the Kahnt full 47. ‘Ich versagte mir Enharmonien um
score, eighteen bars before cue F in section 1. Disharmonien vorzubeugen’ (I renounced
32. It appears on p. 160 of the Kahnt full score, enharmonics in order to eliminate discord),
thirty-five bars before cue N in section 3. LAA, p. 128.
33. In the endnotes to the edition, Liszt 48. BR VII, 383: ‘En général, les grands et petits
mentions that the Cross motive appears in the compositeurs colorent le Requiem en noir, du
Magnificat opening and in the hymn Crux plus impitoyable noir’ and ‘Dans tout cet
fidelis. He states that he used the Cross motive in ouvrage, écrit à Sta Francesca Romana, j’ai tâché
the fugue of the Gloria from the Gran Mass, in de donner au sentiment de la mort un caractère
the final chorus of the Dante Symphony, and in de douce espérance chrétienne.’ See also L II,
the symphonic poem Hunnenschlacht. 431: ‘I endeavored to give expression to the mild,
34. Paul Merrick contributes an insightful redeeming character of death.’
discussion of this oratorio in Revolution and 49. The Latin for the two lines reads: Requiem
Religion, pp. 161–82. See also Paul Allen aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat
Munson, ‘The Oratorios of Franz Liszt’ (Ph.D. eis and Libera me, Domine, de morte aeterna in
diss., 1996), pp. 20–62. die illa tremenda: Quando coeli movendi sunt et
35. See Franz Liszt’s Briefe, ed. La Mara, 8 vols. terra: Dum veneris judicare saeculum per ignem.
(Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1893–1905) 50. Specifically, they appear at de ore leonis
[hereafter BR]. Spontini was one of the (from the lion’s mouth), tartarus (hell), and
composers associated with the morte (death) in the Offertorium, at in quo
nineteenth-century Cecilian movement who totum continetur (in which all shall be
wanted to restore to church music traditional contained), referring to the Book of Judgement,
religious feeling. Cecilianism’s proponents in the Dies irae, and at aeterna (eternal) and
emphasised Gregorian chant as performed in the tremenda (dreadful) in the Libera me.
chapels of Rome and favoured a cappella 51. The Recordare music returns at the Qui
polyphony, of which Palestrina was the leading Mariam absolvisti section of the Dies irae, but
master. the phrase in question has been altered for the
36. Merrick states that the work Liszt planned, new words.
but never carried out in full, was to be entitled 52. Liszt planned Christus in 1853 and
Liturgie catholique, liturgie romaine. Merrick, composed no. 6, ‘The Beatitudes’, in 1855 and
Revolution and Religion, p. 92. 1859. Although Liszt wrote in 1866 that he had
37. Paul Merrick discusses this work in finished the work, he added two more numbers
‘Responses and Antiphons: Liszt in 1860’, Studia before its publication in 1872. It is scored for
musicologica 28 (1986), pp. 187–94. soprano, alto, tenor, baritone, and bass solos,
38. NGD worklist states there were two versions, mixed chorus, orchestra, and organ. See
the first completed in 1860 and published in Merrick, Revolution and Religion,
1861, the second completed in 1870 and pp. 182–4.
published in 1871. The 1871 version is discussed 53. Paul Merrick states, ‘Liszt’s music [for Tu es
here. Petrus] was composed originally to an
39. Searle dates it 1875, NGD ?1860s–1875. anonymous Italian text in praise of Pius IX,
“Dall’ alma Roma sommo Pastore”, published in and c. Searle numbered J15c 32/3 because it
1866 as Inno del Papa.’ Merrick, Revolution and preserves the voice-parts found in 32/1 and 32/2,
Religion, p. 196. omitting only the six-bar postlude.
54. Klaus Wolfgang Niemöller discusses Christus 64. Searle dates it after 1876, NGD 1881.
in ‘Das Oratorium Christus von Franz Liszt: Ein 65. Searle dates it after 1880, NGD 1880–85.
Beitrag zu seinem konzeptionellen Grundlagen’, 66. O salutaris II for mixed chorus, generally
Beiträge zur Geschichte des Oratoriums seit simpler, highlights the words by a texture change
Händel. Festschrift Günther Massenkeil zum 60. from homophonic to unison singing.
Geburtstag, ed. Rainer Cadenbach and Helmut 67. Searle dates it after 1880, NGD 1884.
Loos (Bonn: Voggenreiter Verlag, 1986), 68. Searle dates it before 1885, NGD c. 1884.
pp. 329–43. See also Munson, The Oratorios of 69. Searle gives 1881, NGD 1883–6, based on
Franz Liszt, pp. 63–135. Maria P. Eckhardt, ‘Ein Spätwerk von Liszt: der
55. According to Liszt, he started the work ‘at 129. Psalm’, Studia musicologica 18/1–4 (1976),
the Colosseum, when I lived very close by, at pp. 295–333. The latter is given priority
Santa Francesca Romana’. Letters to Olga von here.
Meyendorff, p. 214. Liszt began that residency in 70. This would not be surprising since Pope Leo
the winter of 1866, so possibly Via Crucis was XIII preached the importance of the rosary in
sketched as early as that year. encyclicals of 1 September 1883 and 30 August
56. The Catholic Encyclopedia, ‘Way of the Cross’. 1884 and prescribed on 6 January 1884 the
57. O Haupt voll Blut, O Traurigkeit, and Vexilla recitation of the Little Office after every Low
regis were among the hymn tunes that Liszt Mass.
harmonised for Cardinal Hohenlohe c. 1878–9, 71. It is specifically used at funerals by the
most likely to be played by Hohenlohe at the priest, but also every Wednesday at Vespers, at
piano. See Merrick, Revolution and Religion, second Vespers of Christmas, in ferial prayers of
pp. 227–31. This set is most commonly known Lauds, and in the Office of the Dead at Vespers
as Zwölf alte deutsche geistliche Weisen, and is (ferial pertains to the days of the week, or to a
edited in Franz Liszt: Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher weekday as distinguished from a festival). It is
Werke/New Edition of the Complete Works, 1st also used at Compline in the Little Office of the
ser. ed. Z. Gárdonyi, I. Sulyok, I. Szelényi, and Blessed Virgin.
others, 2nd ser. ed. I. Sulyok and I. Mezö (Kassel 72. The compositional history of St Stanislaus is
and Budapest, 1970–), i/10, pp. 87–100. Vexilla discussed in Munson, The Oratorios of Franz
regis is a Vespers hymn for the first Sunday of the Liszt, pp. 136–93.
Passion, for second Vespers on May 3, the 73. At the word iniquitates (sins) an augmented
Finding of the Holy Cross, and for second triad appears.
Vespers on Sept 14, the Exaltation of the Holy 74. Merrick, Revolution and Religion, p. 156.
Cross. 75. On the other hand, the section’s tendency to
58. The ‘fall’ Stations begin with a series of vacillate between E major and G minor
chromatic chords over a tonic pedal that finally continues through those two utterances, the
resolve to the tonic. organ following with a dyad B-D, then chords
59. MW V/7, 47: ‘Les compositions suivantes on C major, C minor, and E major.
pourraient se chanter dans les églises et les For a discussion of Psalm 129 and other late
chapelles, peu avant ou durant la dispensation sacred choral pieces, see Dorothea Redepenning
des Saints Sacrements.’ NGD gives 1878–84 as in ‘Meditative Musik: Bemerkungen zu einigen
dates of composition. späten geistlichen Kompositionen Franz Liszts’,
60. MW V/7, 81: ‘J’ai habité quelque temps deux Hamburger Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft 8
chambres contigues à l’église de la Madonna del (1985), pp. 185–201.
Rosario au Monte Mario, près de Rome. Là j’ai 76. Liszt left unfinished two oratorios on Sts
suivi parfois les dévotions du Rosaire, auxquelles Stephen and Stanislaus, representing Hungary
j’ajoute ci-après un accompagnement and Poland, respectively. Paul Munson states, ‘It
musical.’ is tempting to see in this Hungarian–Polish
61. Searle dates it 1866, NGD work list 1867–68. pairing an apostrophe to the Liszt–Wittgenstein
Merrick suggests 1866 as well. See note 53 above. friendship, along lines similar to the
62. MW V/6 labels this Pater noster I. “Rákóczi–Dabrowski” movement Liszt had
Accordingly, Searle calls it Pater noster 1, S29; planned for the Revolutionary Symphony, or the
NGD work list calls it Pater noster II, J14. Searle “Ungarisch” and “Polnisch” numbers from
dates it ‘before 1861’, NGD ?1860. Weihnachtsbaum.’ Munson, The Oratorios of
63. Searle categorised two versions, numbered Franz Liszt, p. 137.
31 and 32 (each with subdivisions). NGD 77. The overview does not consider occasional
worklist states there are three versions, J15a, b, pieces.
270 Notes to page 248
78. Psalm 20 Domine salvum fac regem, stands the cause of the poor, which mattered to Liszt as
apart as a coronation anthem. well. Cecilia, a martyr, was the patron saint of
79. The three other saints are Elisabeth, Cecilia, music and glorified God through her art.
and St Francis of Paula. Elisabeth was a Hungarian St Francis of Paula was the patron saint of the
personage, to whom Liszt was attracted because Franciscan Friars Minor and epitomised
of his Hungarian heritage; she also represented humility; he was also Liszt’s name saint.
Select bibliography
Göllerich, August, Franz Liszt (Berlin: Marquardt, 1908)

Liszt, Franz, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Lina Ramann (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel,
1881–99), Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Detlef Altenburg et al. (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf
& Härtel, 1989–)
Merrick, Paul, Revolution and Religion in the Music of Liszt (Cambridge University
Press, 1987)
Ramann, Lina, Franz Liszt als Künstler und Mensch (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel,
1880–94)
Ramann, Lina, Liszt Pädagogium, ed. Alfred Brendel (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf &
Härtel, 1996)
Saffle, Michael: Franz Liszt-A Guide to Research (New York: Garland 1991, rev. edn,
Routledge, 2004)
Searle, Humphrey, The Music of Franz Liszt, 2nd edn (New York: Dover, 1966)
Suttoni, Charles, Franz Liszt: An Artist’s Journey. Lettres d’un Bachelier ès Musique
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989)
Walker, Alan, Franz Liszt, 3 vols. (Vols. I and II New York: Macmillan 1983–9,
Vol. III New York: Random House, 1996, rev. edn. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press)
Walker, Alan, ed., Living with Liszt, from the Diary of Carl Lachmund (Stuyvesant,
NY: Pendragon Press, 1995)
Walker, Alan, ed., The Death of Franz Liszt, Based on the Diary of his Pupil Lina
Schmalhausen (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002)
Watson, Derek, Liszt (New York: Schirmer, 1989)
Williams, Adrian, Portrait of Liszt by Himself and His Contemporaries (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1990)
Williams, Adrian, trans. and ed., Selected Letters of Franz Liszt (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1998)
Zimdars, Richard Louis, trans. and ed., The Piano Masterclasses of August Göllerich,
ed. Wilhelm Jerger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996)
[271]
Index of Liszt’s musical works
Orchestral works ‘Lyon’, 67, 224

Piano and orchestra Paraphrases, 66–70
early (unpublished) concerti, 154–5 ‘Psaume’, 67, 224
Concerto no. 1 in E major, 28, 38, 44, 154, ‘Vallée d’Obermann’, 68–9, 72, 76, 114
155–7, 159–60, 161, 162, 170 Années de Pèlerinage, 36, 37, 42, 163
Concerto no. 2 in A minor, 28, 154, 159, Book I, 66–70, 150
160–1, 162, 170 Book II, 150
‘Concerto no. 3 in E major’ (published Book III, 89–90, 99, 112, 119, 120, 132,
posthumously), 58, 60 135–50, 151
De profundis: Psaume Instrumentale, 71, ‘Angelus!’, 93, 114, 115, 136, 137–8, 140,
158–9, 161, 169, 224 144, 145, 147–8
Festvorspiel, 57 Après une lecture de Dante, 69, 219
Grande Fantaisie Symphonique (‘Lélio ‘Au bord d’une source’, 142, 174–5
Fantasy’, after Berlioz), 157–9 ‘Aux Cyprès de la Villa d’Este’, nos. 1/2,
Hungarian Fantasy, 38 111, 136, 138–41, 144, 145, 146–8, 149,
Totentanz, 41, 44, 154, 158, 162–70, 264 150
Symphonic works Ave Maria, 243
Dante Symphony, 57, 210, 219–22 ‘Canzonetta del Salvator Rosa’, 69
Faust Symphony, 28, 38, 42, 44–5, 68, 75, 77, ‘Les Jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este’, 43, 136,
80, 195, 208, 216–19, 266 140–2, 148–50, 256
Mephisto Waltz no. 1, 34 Marche funèbre: en mémoire de Maximilien
Symphonic Poems, ix, 42, 66, 206–7, 255 I, 141, 143–4, 145, 146, 148, 149, 150
Ce qu’on entend sur la montagne, 213 ‘Orage’, 201
Festklänge, 214–15 ‘Il Penseroso’, 69, 139
Hamlet, 215, 220 Petrarch Sonnets, 69, 114, 200
Héroı̈de funèbre, 39, 213–14 ‘Sposalizio’, 69
Hunnenschlacht, 215 ‘Sunt lacrymae rerum’, 124–41, 142, 146,
Die Ideale, 213, 220 148, 149, 150
Mazeppa, 43, 70, 210 ‘Sursum Corda’, 114–15, 136, 137, 141,
Orpheus, 208–9, 222 144–6, 147, 148, 150
Les Préludes, 28, 38, 41, 42, 213 Venezia e Napoli, 44, 208
Prometheus, 208, 209–10, 216 Concert Studies, 37
Tasso, 207–8, 216 Consolations, 186, 187
Von der Wiege bis zum Grabe, 215–16 Five Little Piano Pieces, 103, 104–6
Symphonie révolutionnaire, 214, 267 Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, 61, 62,
70–2, 186, 224, 226
Organ works ‘Bénédiction de Dieu dans la Solitude’, 71,
Miscellaneous 178, 182
Fantasy and Fugue on ‘Ad nos, ad salutarem ‘Funérailles’, 71–2, 178, 182, 184–5
undam’ (after Meyerbeer), 57–8, 76 ‘Hymne’, 267
Prelude and Fugue on the name BACH, 76, ‘Invocation’, 79, 180–1
106–7 ‘Pensée des morts’, 71, 267
Hungarian Historical Portraits, 89–90, 110,
Piano works 112, 119, 120, 126–35, 136–7, 146, 151,
Cycles and collections 262
Album d’un Voyageur, 64, 66–70 1. Stephan Széchenyi, 128, 132, 133, 134
‘La Chapelle de Guillaume Tell’, 67–8, 2. Joseph Eötvös, 128–9, 130, 134
224 3. Michael Vörösmarty, 129, 130, 133, 134
‘Les Cloches de G[enève]’, 67–8, 224 4. Ladislaus Teleki, 129–30, 133, 134, 140
Fleurs Mélodiques des Alpes, 66–7 5. Franz Deák, 130, 133, 134
Impressions et Poésies, 66–7 6. Alexander Petöfi, 131, 133, 134–5, 262
[272]
273 Index of Liszt’s musical works
Cycles and collections (Cont.) Nationalistic

7. Michael Mosonyi (Mosonyis Csárdás macabre, 102, 109–10
Grabgeleit/Trauerklänge), 127, 128, 129, Five Hungarian Folksongs, 107
131–2, 133, 134, 135 ‘Heroic March in Hungarian Style’, 36, 215
Hungarian Rhapsodies, 28, 43, 44, 45, 84 Szózat und Ungarischer Hymnus, 107, 127–8
no. 2, Ungarischer Geschwindmarsch, 107
nos. 16–19, 36, 110 Sacred keyboard music
Liebesträume, 28 Ave Maria, 111, 184
‘Drei notturnos’, 192 chorale settings, 111
no. 3, 184 In domum Domini ibimus, 111
no. 3 (‘O lieb, so lang du lieben kannst’), In festo transfigurationis Domini nostri Jesu
204 Christi, 111, 113, 114
Weihnachtsbaum, 89–90, 121 Prelude and Hymn of St Francis, 111
Etudes Sancta Dorothea, 111
‘Ab Irato’, 74–75 ‘Vexilla Regis’, 111
Douze Grandes Etudes, 59–60, 64, 65–6, Via Crucis, 89–90, 112, 119, 120–6, 151, 261
72–4, 76 O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden, 123, 269
Vision (G minor), 185–6 O Traurigkeit, O Herzeleid, 124–5, 269
Etude en douze exercices dans tous les tons Stabat Mater, 122, 124, 125
majeurs et mineurs, 59–60, 65, 73, 74 Vexilla Regis, 122, 125, 269
Etudes d’après Paganini, 64–5, 74 Sonatas/extended forms
‘La Campanella’, 74, 184 Ballade no. 2 in B minor, 57, 79–80, 186, 189
Etudes d’exécution transcendante, 36, 42, 72, Grand Concert Solo in E minor, 75–6, 186,
73 189
Eroica, 59, 188 Mephisto Waltz no. 1, 80
‘Harmonies du soir’, 43, 73, 183 Mephisto Waltzes nos. 3 and 4 (see also
‘Mazeppa’, 73–4, 210 Bagatelle ohne Tonart), 116
‘Wilde Jagd’, 73 Scherzo and March, 76–7, 184, 186
Feux follets, 188 Sonata in B minor, 37–8, 40, 41, 44, 70,
‘Gnomenreigen’, 75 75–6, 77–9, 185, 187, 190, 226–7
‘Morceau du Salon, Etude de Transcriptions and arrangements
Perfectionnement’ see ‘Ab Irato’ of own Lieder, 203–5
Ricordanza, 178, 190 A la chapelle Sixtine (Mozart/Allegri), 57,
Technische Studien, 103 84–5
Trois Etudes de concert, 75 Dance of the Sylphs (Berlioz, Damnation of
‘La Leggierezza’, 264 Faust), 187
‘Un sospiro’, 75, 178, 185, 189 Danse macabre (Saint-Saëns), 102, 184
‘Waldesrauchen’, 75, 189 Fantasia on Don Giovanni/The Marriage of
Juvenilia Figaro (Mozart), 57, 80, 83–4
Allegro di Bravura, 58, 59 Fantasia on Der Freischütz (Weber), 83
Diabelli variation, 58 Fantasia on Guitarero (Halévy), 83
early sonatas, 59 Fantasia on Les Huguenots (Meyerbeer), 81
Eight Variations on an original theme in A Fantasia on La Juive (Halévy), 81–4
major, 58 Fantasia on Maometto (Rossini), 82
Impromptu on themes of Rossini and Spontini, Fantasia on Norma (Bellini), 81–2, 83–4
59, 84 Fantasia on Il Pirata (Bellini), 81
Rondo di Bravura, 58 Fantasia on I Puritani (Bellini), 82, 84, 154
Scherzo in G minor, 59 Fantasia on Rienzi (Wagner), 84
Seven Brilliant Variations on a theme of Fantasia on Rigoletto (Verdi), 189
Rossini, 58–9 Fantasia on La Sonnambula (Bellini), 83–4
Mourning/Elegiac Fantasia on ‘I tuoi frequenti palpiti’ (Pacini,
Am Grabe Richard Wagners, 113 Niobe), 81, 154
Elegie (‘Die Zelle in Nonnenwerth’), 90–8 Fantasie and Fuge in G minor (Bach), 103
La lugubre gondola, nos. 1/2, 90, 113 Grande Fantaisie de Bravoure sur La Clochette
R. W. – Venezia, 113 (Paganini), 64
‘Schlaflos! Frage und Antwort’, 34, 113–16 Grande Fantaisie sur la tyrolienne de l’opéra
‘Unstern! Sinistre, disastro’, 34, 90, 113, ‘La fiancée’ (Auber), 60–1, 65
116 Gretchen am Spinnrade (Schubert), 184
Hexameron (Bellini), 82, 154 ‘Comment, disaient-ils’ (Hugo), 192

My Joys (Chopin), 190 ‘Der du von dem Himmel bist’ (Goethe),
Overture to Les Francs-Juges (Berlioz), 62 194, 199, 201–2, 203–4
Overture to Tannhäuser (Wagner), 185 ‘Drei Lieder aus Schillers Wilhelm Tell’,
Overture to William Tell (Rossini), 82–3 200–1, 204
Reminiscences de Boccanegra (Verdi), 99 ‘Die drei Zigeuner’ (Lenau), 198, 204
Reminiscences de la Scala (after Mercadante’s ‘Du bist wie eine Blume’ (Heine), 192, 199
Il giuramento), 83, 84 ‘Enfant, si j’étais roi’ (Hugo), 201
Reminiscences de Lucia di Lammermoor ‘Es muss ein Wunderbares sein’ (Redwitz),
(Donizetti), 81–2, 83 192, 193
Reminiscences de Lucrezia Borgia (Donizetti), ‘Es war ein König in Thule’ (Goethe), 193–4,
83 196, 198, 201, 203
Reminiscences de Robert le Diable ‘Die Fischerstochter’ (Heine), 195
(Meyerbeer), 80, 83–4, 178, 183, 188, ‘Go not, happy day’ (Tennyson), 196
189 ‘Ich möchte hingehn’ (Herwegh), 198
‘Salve Maria’ (Verdi, I Lombardi), 175 ‘Ihr Glocken von Marling’, 198
Sarabande and Chaconne from Almira ‘Il m’aimait tant’ (Gay), 194, 203
(Handel), 103 ‘Im Rhein’ (Heine), 194, 198
Soirées de Vienne (Schubert), 61–2, 174 ‘Isten veled’ (Horvath), 195
Symphonie Fantastique (Berlioz), 57, 62–3, ‘Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher’ (Dumas), 204
187 ‘Die Liebe des toten Dichters’ (Jokai), 128
Symphonies nos. 5, 6, 7 (Beethoven), 62–3 ‘Die Lorelei’ (Heine), 139, 193, 194, 196,
Tarantelle (Cui), 99 197–8, 199, 201, 203, 204, 262
Tarantelle de Bravura (Auber, La Muette de ‘Magyar Kiraly-dal’, 195
Portici), 174 Mignons Lied (‘Kennst du das Land’)
Waltz from Faust (Gounod), 84 (Goethe), 194, 195, 204
Two pianos ‘Ne brani menya, moy drug’ (Tolstoy),
Concerto Pathétique, 76 195–6
Miscellaneous ‘O lieb, so lang du lieben kannst’
Apparitions, 61–2 (Freiligrath), 192, 204
Bagatelle ohne Tonart, 116–19 ‘Oh pourquoi donc’, 196–7
Berceuse, 79 ‘Oh! quand je dors’ (Hugo), 199
‘En rêve. Nocturne’, 106 ‘La Perla’ (Hohenlohe), 195
Fantasy and Fugue on the name BACH, ‘Schwebe, schwebe, blaues Auge’, 199
106–7 ‘Die tote Nachtigall’, 198
Grand Galop chromatique, 42 Tre Sonetti Di Petrarca, 195, 200, 203, 204
Impromptu, 106 ‘Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh’ (Wanderers
‘Nuages gris’, 34 Nachtlied II) (Goethe), 192, 199
Rákóczy March, 236 ‘Und wir dachten der toten’ (Freiligrath),
Rhapsodie espagnole, 37, 40 198
Romance Oubliée, 196–7 ‘Die Vätergruft’ (Uhland), 195, 198, 204
St Francis de Paolo Walking on the Waves, 80, ‘Vergiftet sind meine Lieder’ (Heine), 198,
174, 183 203
St Francis of Assisi: the Sermon to the Birds, ‘Wie singt die Lerche schön’ (Fallersleben),
80 198
Toccata, 103–4 ‘Die Zelle in Nonnenwerth’ (Lichnowsky),
Trois Morceaux Suisses, 67 90–1, 97–8, 194, 203, 261
‘Trübe Wolken’, 113 Masses
Valse Oubliée, 184 Gran Mass (Missa solemnis zur Erweihung der
Variations on a theme of Bach: ‘Weinen, klagen, Basilika in Gran), ix, 229–30, 235
sorgen, zagen’, 76 Mass for Male Voices (Szekszárd Mass), 225–6,
229, 230
Vocal works Missa choralis, 235
Lieder Ungarische Krönungsmesse (Coronation Mass),
‘A Magyarok Istene’ (‘Ungarns Gott’), 234, 235–6, 268
127–41, 195 Opera
‘Angiolin dal biondo crin’ (Bocelli), 194, Don Sanche, 194
195, 203 Sardanapale (unfinished), 70, 204
Oratorios Pater noster I, 224–5

Christus, 34, 237–41, 268 Pater noster II/III/IV, 243
Die Legende von der heiligen Elisabeth, 34, 42, Pax vobiscum, 243
231–2, 237–8, 240, 248, 268 Pro papa I, 243
St Stanislaus (unfinished), 89, 119, 269 Psalm 13 (Herr, wie lange?), ix, 41, 226–7, 267
St Stephen (unfinished), 269 Psalm 18 (Die Himmel erzählen die Ehre
Other sacred choral works Gottes), 233, 234
An den heiligen Franziskus von Paula, 234 Psalm 23 (Mein Gott, der ist mein Hirt), 227
Anima Christi I/II, 243 Psalm 67 Gott sei uns gnaedig (Meine Seel’
Ave Maria I, 111, 224–5 erhebt den Herrn!), 233–4
Ave Maria II/III, 243 Psalm 97 (Der Herr bewahret die Seelen seiner
Ave Maris stella, 244 Heiligen), 233–4
Ave verum corpus, 244 Psalm 116 (Laudate Dominum), 234, 235
The Bells of Strassburg Cathedral, 113 Psalm 129 (De profundis), 244, 245, 247, 269
Cantantibus organis, 242 Psalm 137 (An den Wassern zu Babylon),
Cantico del Sol, 234–5 227–8, 267
Christus est geboren, 244, 269 Qui Mariam absolvisti, 244, 245–7
Crux! Hymne des marins, 243 Qui seminant in lacrimis, 244–5, 246
Dall’ alma Roma sommo Pastore, 243 Requiem, 236–7, 244, 268
Domine salvum fac regem, 228, 267 Responsorien und Antiphonen, 232–3
Die heilige Cäcilia Legende, 230–1, 242, Rosario, 241, 242
267 Salve regina, 244
In domum Domini ibimus, 244–5, 246 Die Seligkeiten, 228–9
Inno a Maria Vergine, 243 Septem sacramenta, 241–2
Libera me, 244 Slavimo slavno, Slaveni!, 178, 243
Mariengarten. Quasi cedrus!, 244–5, 246 Tantum ergo, 244
Mihi autem adhaerere, 234 Te Deum I/II, 228, 267
Nun danket alle Gott, 243 Via crucis, 241, 269
O heilige Nacht, 244 Secular choral works
O Roma nobilis, 243–4 Arbeiterchor, 210
O sacrum convivium, 244, 245–7 Festival cantata, 21, 22–7
O salutaris hostia, 244, 269 Five Choruses on French Texts, 226
Ossa arida, 244–5, 246 Hymne de l’enfant à son réveil, 226
General index
Abendroth, Walter, 29 Piano sonata, op. 27, no. 1

Ábrányi, K., 107, 110 Symphony no. 9, x, 23, 77, 150
Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, 209 transcriptions of, 57, 62–3, 174 (see also
alienation, relationship with creativity, 2–3, Index of Liszt’s Musical Works:
208 Transcriptions and arrangements)
Allegri, Gregorio, Miserere, 84 Waldstein sonata, 68
Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein, 38, 39, Belgiojoso, Cristina, Princess, 81, 82, 195
255, 257 Bellas, Jacqueline, 5
Altenburg, Detlef, ix, 46, 47, 49, 206, 254, 259 Bellini, Vincenzo see Index of Liszt’s Musical
American Liszt Society, 51, 258 Works: Transcriptions and
Andersen, Hans Christian, 8 arrangements
‘Armonipiano’, 175 Berlioz, Hector, 1, 3–4, 12, 72, 159, 204, 206,
Auber, Daniel-François, 60 216
see also Index of Liszt’s Musical Works: comments on Liszt, 6, 12, 65, 81–4, 173–4
Transcriptions and arrangements Liszt’s letters to, 4, 169, 219
Augusz, Baron, 87 Liszt’s transcriptions of, 57, 62–3 (see also
autobiography Index of Liszt’s Musical Works:
Liszt’s attitude to, 16–17, 18, 19, 20 Transcriptions and arrangements)
‘moments’ in, 20, 25, 26–7 Euphonia, 251
theories of, 17–19, 20–1, 252 Lélio, ou le retour de la vie, 157–8
Autran, Joseph, 213 Requiem, 237
Bernstein, Susan, 54
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 76, 149–50, 172–3 Bloom, Harold, 30
Bache, Walter, 103 Bogarde, Dirk, 55
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 30 Boissier, Caroline, 8
Ballanché, Pierre-Simon, 1, 11 Bononcini, Giovanni, 69
Orphée, 208 Borodin, Alexander, 86, 102–3, 195–6
ballets, based on Liszt’s works, 45 Bory, Robert, 49
Balzac, Honoré de, 1 Bourdieu, Pierre, 30
Béatrice, 10, 13, 250 Bourgeois, Louis, 67
Gambara, 3 Brahms, Johannes, 41, 57, 74, 79, 107, 154,
Barrault, Emile, 10–11, 251 162, 188, 191
Bartók, Béla, 31, 33–4, 109 German Requiem, 255
comments on Liszt, 40, 76, 256 Breidenstein, Heinrich Karl, 21, 22
Liszt’s influence on, 38, 40–1 Brendel, Alfred, 37, 161, 185
Bayreuth, 29 British Liszt Society, 34, 51, 258
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 8–10, 59, 72, 77, 81, Bülow, Cosima von, née Liszt see Wagner
175 Bülow, Hans von, 45, 142, 163, 169–70, 174,
Liszt’s views on, 89, 150, 174, 206, 219, 195
263–4 Burke, Edmund, 6–7
relationship with Liszt, 21–2, 252 Busoni, Ferruccio, 33–4, 36–7, 42, 76, 83, 84,
Festival/Monument (Bonn, 1845), 21–5, 253 103, 152, 153, 170, 172–3, 191, 255,
‘Appassionata’ sonata, 73 264
Archduke Trio in B major, 23–5, 26 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 4
Diabelli variations, 58 The Lament of Tasso, 207, 208
‘Emperor’ Concerto, op. 73, 156 Mazeppa, 210
Hammerklavier sonata, 65, 173–4
‘Moonlight’ sonata, op. 27, no. ix, 7, 59, 71, Carl Alexander, Grand Duke, 86, 206, 228,
73, 78, 190 257
Piano Concerto no. 5, 21 Carl August, Duke of Weimar, 213
Piano sonata, op. 101, 1, 138 Carlyle, Thomas, Sartor Resartus, 18–19
[276]
277 General index
Cecilia, St, 270 Dargomizhsky, Alexander Sergeyevich, 102

see also Index of Liszt’s Musical Works: Other Deák, Franz, 127
sacred choral works see also Index of Liszt’s Musical Works:
Cecilian movement, 268 Historical Hungarian Portraits
Cellini, Benvenuto, 18 death, role in Liszt’s thought/work, 87, 90,
Chantavoine, Jean, 49 112–16, 145–6, 236–7
Chateaubriand, François-René, 226, 249 Debussy, Claude
Cherubini, Luigi, Requiem, 237 Images, 104
Chopin, Frédéric François, 1, 33, 65, 66, 71–2, Liszt’s relationship with/influence on 43, 86,
85, 106, 152, 171 141–2
Liszt’s comments on, 77, 174, 184 Delacroix, Eugène, 1
Ballades, 176 Des Bohémiens et leur musique en hongrie
Berceuse, 79 (Liszt), 46
Etude op. 10, no. 9, 779 Diabelli, Anton, 58
Fantasy in F minor, 75 ‘Dies Irae’ (plainchant), 163, 167–9
Hexameron, 82 d’Indy, Vincent, 43
Nocturne in G major, op. 37, no. 2, Dohnányi, Ernst von, 41, 60
138 Donizetti, Gaetano see Index of Liszt’s Musical
Nocturne in G minor, 68 Works: Transcriptions and arrangements
Polonaise, op. 53, 189 Dumas, Alexandre, 196
Polonaise-Fantaisie, 150 see also Index of Liszt’s Musical Works:
Study in F minor, op. 25, no. 2, 75 Lieder
see also Index of Liszt’s Musical Works: Dumont, Henri, 236
Transcriptions and arrangements Messe royale, 268
‘Chopsticks’, variations on, 102–3
Chorley, Henry, 6 Eastern Europe (Iron Curtain), Liszt studies in,
Christopher, St, 248 32–3, 49–254
see also Index of Liszt’s Musical Works: Other see also Hungary
sacred choral works Eckhardt, Mária, ix, 34, 49, 53, 259
collected works (of Liszt, publishing project), Edinburgh Review, 17–18
33–4, 254, 255 Egressy, Béni, 107, 129
concerto form Eisenstadt conference (1986), 33
development/critiques, 152–3 Eliot, George, 216
sub-genres, 153–4 Elisabeth, St, 270
Correggio (Antonio Allegri), 260 see also Index of Liszt’s Musical Works:
Cortot, Alfred, 190 Oratorios
Cui, César, 86, 102–3, 195–6 Enfantin, Prosper, 10
see also Index of Liszt’s Musical Works: Eötvös, Joseph, 127
Transcriptions and arrangements see also Index of Liszt’s Musical Works:
Czerny, Karl, 81, 82, 154–5 Historical Hungarian Portraits
Erard family, 175, 177
d’Agoult, Marie, 267 Erkel, Ferenc, 41
dedications to, 139, 194
Liszt’s comments on, 261 ‘Farinelli’s Ground’, 169
Liszt’s letters to, 49, 200, 251 Fay, Amy, 47
Mémoires, 250 Felix, Werner, 50, 258
Nélida, 15, 250 Ferrazzi, Giuseppe, 200
relationship with Liszt, 66–7, 97–8, 135, 150, Ferrière, Théophile de, Brand-Sachs, 4–5, 250
258 Fétis, François Joseph, 12, 74, 75
travels with Liszt, 3, 6, 67, 159, 195 Field, John, Piano Concerto no. 7, 78
Dahlhaus, Carl, 49, 226 film soundtracks, use of Liszt on,
d’Albert, Eugen, 33–4, 172–3, 179, 182 Fleischmann, Tilly, Aspects of the Liszt Tradition,
Dalmonte, Rossana, 51, 54 177–8
Daltrey, Roger, 55 Floros, Constantin, 42
Danhauser, Josef, Liszt am Flügel, 8–10, France, Liszt’s influence in, 43–4
250 Francis of Assisi, St, 234, 248
Dante (Alighieri), Divine Comedy, 70, 150, see also Index of Liszt’s Musical Works: Other
219–22, 266 sacred choral works
278 General index
Francis of Paula, St, 270 Heine, Heinrich, 1

see also Index of Liszt’s Musical Works: Other Buch der Lieder, 203
sacred choral works comments on Liszt, 1, 8, 15, 253
Franck, César, 43 Liszt’s settings of, 196 (see also Index of
Franz Josef II, Emperor, 127, 143, 235 Liszt’s Musical Works: Lieder)
Freiligrath, Ferdinand von, 196, 204 Henselt, Adolf, 173, 179
see also Index of Liszt’s Musical Works: Herder, Johann Gottfried, 265
Lieder Der entfesselte Prometheus, 209–10, 265
Friedheim, Arthur, 47, 127, 182, 183, 189, 190, Mein Gott, der ist mein Hirt (Psalm 23), 227
261 Herwegh, Georg see Index of Liszt’s Musical
Füssmann, Werner, 48 Works: Lieder
Herz, Heinrich, 2, 60–1, 78, 82
Gárdonyi, Zoltán, 48 Hiller, Ferdinand, 173
Gautier, Théophile, 8 Hindemith, Paul, 121
Geibel, Emanuel, 196 Hinson, Maurice, 51
Genast, Emilie, 194 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 2, 4–5, 6–7, 10–11, 249
Génie oblige (Liszt’s motto), 17, 25, 26, 29 Hoffmann von Fallersleben, August Heinrich,
Germany, Liszt’s influence/Liszt studies in, 196
42–3, 49 see also Index of Liszt’s Musical Works:
Gershwin, George, 45 Lieder
Girard, Narcisse, 159 Hofmeister, Friedrich, 33
Girardin, Emilie de, 230 Hohenlohe, Gustav Adolf, Cardinal, 269
Gluck, Christoph Willibald, Orfeo ed Euridice, Hohenlohe, Therèse von, 195
208 Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, Marie von, Fürstin,
Godowsky, Leopold, 37, 189 47, 257
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 22–3, 206 Holbein, Hans, Todtentanz, 162, 163–5, 167
Dichtung und Wahrheit (autobiography), Horovitz, Vladimir, 179
18–19 Horvath, Emmerich, 51
Faust, 42, 77, 193–4, 195, 216, 217–19 Howard, Leslie, ix, 37–8, 83
Letters from Italy, 3 Huber, Ferdinand, 67
Liszt’s settings of, 196 (see also Index of Hueffer, Francis, 192–3
Liszt’s Musical Works: Lieder) Hugo, Victor, 1, 69, 74
Torquato Tasso, 207 Liszt’s settings of, 196, 203 (see also Index of
Göllerich, August, 47, 177, 181, 188, 189 Liszt’s Musical Works: Lieder)
Grainger, Percy, Rosenkavalier Ramble, 172 Feuilles d’Automne, 213
Grandpont, Guichon de, 243 Mazeppa, 210
Gregory XVI, Pope, 232 Hummel, Johann Nepomuk, 77, 81, 206
Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Hungary
192–3 Liszt studies in, 29, 32, 41–2, 48, 254
new (online) edition, 266 place in Liszt’s life/music, 40, 71–2, 79, 86,
Gut, Serge, 48, 50, 53, 54, 260 107–10, 127, 214–15, 231, 236
political events, 71–2, 142
Habermann, Michael, 37 Huschke, Wolfram, 49
Haitink, Bernard, 255
Halévy, Jacques see Index of Liszt’s Musical Impromptu (1990), 55
Works: Transcriptions and interpretation, composers’ attittudes to, 172–3
arrangements Ives, Charles, 45, 115
Halle, Charles, 188
Hamburger, Klára, 50, 53 Janina, Olga, 15
Hamilton, Kenneth, 37–8 Jauss, Hans-Robert, 30, 253
Handel, George Frideric Jean Paul (Johann Paul Richter), 18–19
Almira, 103 Jokai, Maurus, 128
Fugue in E minor, 174 Joseffy, Rafael, 179
Hanska, Eva, 6 Jung, Hans-Rudolf, 49
Hanslick, Eduard, 176, 188–9, 193, 205
Haraszti, Emile, 49 Kalkbrenner, Friedrich, 65, 74
Haselböck, Martin, 35 Effusio Musica, 77
Hausegger, Friedrich von, 39 Kant, Immanuel, 6
279 General index
Kaulbach, Wilhelm von, 215 national(istic) character, 29, 32–3, 107–10,

Kellermann, Berthold, 33–4 236, 258 (see also Hungary)
Kleinertz, Rainer, 53 pedal markings, 185–7
Klindworth, Agnès, 53 performances/recordings, ix, 30, 32, 35–8,
Knopf, Ernst, 67 39, 40, 44, 183, 190, 255,
Kodály, Zoltán, 41 264
Köhler, Louis, 177 posthumous recognition, 28–9, 31–3, 39,
Kramer, Lawrence, 217, 250 90, 152
Kristeva, Julia, 30 publication of works, 32, 33–5, 257 (see
Kurtág, György, 41–2 also collected works)
reuse of old material, 60
Lachmund, Karl, 177, 182, 184–5, 189 selection of material, 248
Lamartine, Alphonse-Marie-Louis de, 1, 61 transcriptions of others’ works, 57–8,
Hymne de l’enfant à son réveil, 226 80–5, 99–3
Méditations Poétiques, 213 use of multiple media, 120–1
Lambert, Constant, 45 use of traditional material, 66–7
Lamennais, Abbé Robert-Félicité de, 1, 10, 11, contradictions of personality, 5–6, 14, 20–1,
13, 158, 223–4, 232, 267 32, 249, 250
Lamond, Frederick, 182, 189 correspondence, 47, 259 (see also names of
Legány, Dezsö, 48 correspondents)
Legouvé, Ernest, 7 fictionalised depictions, 4–5, 14–15, 250
Lejeune, Philippe, 252 health (mental/physical), 8, 87, 119
Lenau, Nikolaus, 196 images of, 8–10, 48–9
see also Index of Liszt’s Musical Works: literary/cultural interests, 1–2, 4, 249–50
Lieder motto see Génie oblige
Leo XIII, Pope, 243, 269 as pianist, 2
Leppert, Richard, 250 contemporary reputation, 4, 6–10, 21–2,
Leschetitsky, Theodore, 185 28, 66, 80–1, 252–3
Lewes, George Henry, 216 impact on composing career, 65–6
Liadov, Anatol, 102–3 instruments, 175–7
Liapunov, Sergei, 44 performance style, 173–4, 175–6, 188–9,
Lichnowsky, Felix, Count, 97–8 191
Ligeti, György, 41–2, 256 repertoire, 81
Lipsius, Marie (‘La Mara’), 45–6, 47 political outlook, 5–6, 10–2, 67, 143, 214,
Liszt, Adam (father), 1, 5, 87, 154–5 224, 231, 258
Liszt, Anna (mother), 158, 226, 236 religious beliefs, 112, 126, 133, 150, 223–4,
Liszt, Blandine (daughter), 66, 68, 87, 194, 248
237 romantic attachments, 1–2, 5, 13, 15 (see also
Liszt, Cosima see Wagner d’Agoult, Marie; Sayn-Wittgenstein,
Liszt, Daniel (son), 76, 87, 237 Carolyne von)
Liszt, Franz as teacher, 31, 32, 35–6, 86, 171, 174–5,
artistic persona, 3–4, 10, 14, 20–1, 28 177–5, 254–5
autobiographical statement, 26–7 travels, 3–4, 87, 135
(see also autobiography as main heading) writings, 252, 258
biographical studies/researches, 14–15, De la musique religieuse, 224
19–20, 30–1, 45, 252 Lettres d’un bachelier, 3–4, 11–2, 249
as composer (for titles of works see Index of Lisztomania (1975), 15–18, 55
Liszt’s Musical Works) Litolff, Henry, 162
attitude to interpretations, 171–2, 179, Louis-Philippe of France, 1
180–2, 183–5, 189–1
biographical interpretations of music, Mahler, Gustav, 39, 42, 256
19–21, 77 Mainzer, Joseph, 11
contemporary reputation, 159, 223 Maria Pawlowna, Grand Duchess, 208
creativity in later years, 87–9, 119, 120, Mason, William, 45, 182, 188
150–1 Mátéka, Béla, 48
imitations/homages to, 30, 42, 256 Maximilian I, Emperor, 87, 143, 236
influence on later composers, 31, 36, 37, Mendelssohn, Felix, 78, 194
38–5, 161–2, 254 Capriccio brillante, 158, 160
280 General index
Menter, Sophie, 82, 174 ‘piano-organ’, owned by Liszt, 175

Merrick, Paul, 247 piano(s)
Messiaen, Olivier, 121 construction, 175–6
Metzner, Paul, 54 performance techniques, 65
Meyendorff, Olga von, 104–6, 147–8, 261, 262 Pictet, Adolphe, 11, 62, 63–4
Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 78 Pistone, Daniel, 38
Les Huguenots, 79 Pius IX, Pope, 235, 239, 243
Le Prophète, 57–8, 75 Pixis, Johann Peter, 82
see also Index of Liszt’s Musical Works: plainchant, Liszt’s use of, 232–3, 235
Transcriptions and arrangements Pleyel, Marie, 82
Michelangelo (Buonarotti), 69, 136, 139 Pocknell, Pauline, 53
Milhaud, Darius, 45 Pohl, Jeanne, 209
Miller, Norbert, 49 Pohl, Richard, 47, 209–10, 265
Milton, John, 77 politics, impact on Liszt studies, 32–3
Montalembert, Charles, Comte de, Vie de Sainte see also Nazism
Elisabeth, 231 Pourtalès, Guy de, 49
Moscheles, Ignaz, 160 Prahács, Margit, 50
Piano Concerto in G minor, op. 60, 157 Prokofiev, Sergei, 44
Piano Concerto no. 6 in B minor (‘Concert Propertius, 143, 262
Fantastique’), op. 90, 78, 159
Mosonyi, Mihály, 41, 87, 127–8 Raab, Antonia, 113
Trauerklänge zum Tode István Széchenyis, 129 Raabe, Peter, 33–4, 38, 46–7, 48
see also Index of Liszt’s Musical Works: Rabes, Lennart, 258
Historical Hungarian Portraits Rachmaninov, Sergei, 44
Mottl, Felix, 193 Racine, Jean, 226
Mouchanoff, Marie, 87 Raff, Joachim, 57–8, 71
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 84 Ramann, Lina, 47, 59
Piano Concerto in C Minor, 36 Franz Liszt als Künstler und Mensch, 15–16,
Requiem, 163, 169, 237 17, 23, 45–6, 257
see also Index of Liszt’s Musical Works: Liszt-Pädagogium, 177, 178, 179, 183, 184,
Transcriptions and arrangements 185, 187–8
Mueller, Rena, 53, 54 Lisztiana, 251, 266
‘Munich School’, 39 Liszt’s letters to, 19, 145
Musorgsky, Modest Petrovich, Pictures at an Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio), 69
Exhibition, 121 Rathkolb, Oliver, 31–2
Musset, Alfred de, 1, 196 Ravel, Maurice, 43, 141, 257
Redepenning, Dorothea, 52
Napoleon III, 143 Redwitz, Oscar von see Index of Liszt’s Musical
Nazism, appropriation of Liszt’s memory, 29, Works: Lieder
32, 46, 48, 254 Reger, Max, 42
Newman, Ernest, 50 Reissmann, August, 153, 170
Niecks, Friedrich, 46 Rellstab, Ludwig, settings of, 196
Remenyi, Mihály, 188
Ollivier, Daniel, 49 research centres, 258–9
Ortigue, Joseph d’, 60–1 Ricordi, Aldo, 175
Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai, 86, 102–3
Paderewski, Ignacy Jan, 44, 177, 190, 264 Ritter, Alexander, 38–9
Paganini, Niccolò, 8, 17, 64, 65 Rive-Necker, Albertine de la, 8
see also Index of Liszt’s Musical Works: Roberge, Marc-André, 37
Transcriptions and arrangements Romanticism, 1–4, 10, 249, 251
Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da, 71, 242, 268 Liszt’s relationship with, 5, 7–10, 12–13, 85
Paris, as cultural centre, 1 Roquette, Otto, 231
Pasta, Giuditta, 81 Rosenblatt, Jay, 162
Petöfi, Alexander, 127–39 Rosenthal, Moritz, 177, 183, 189, 190
see also Index of Liszt’s Musical Works: Rossini, Gioacchino, 58–9, 82–3
Historical Hungarian Portraits see also Index of Liszt’s Musical Works:
Petrarch, 69 Transcriptions and arrangements
see also Index of Liszt’s Musical Works: Rózsavölgyi, Márk, 214
Lieder Rubinstein, Anton, 102, 173, 182, 188, 190
281 General index
Rückert, Friedrich, 196 Shostakovich, Dmitri, 44

Russell, Ken, 15 Sibelius, Jean, 44–5
Russia, Liszt’s influence in, 44–9 Siloti, Alexander, 44, 47, 174, 190
Sitwell, Sacheverell, 28–9, 37
Saffle, Michael, x, 53–4, 192 societies (Liszt appreciation/performance), 51
Saint-Cricq, Caroline de, 1–2, 61 Somfai, László, 40–1
Saint-Saëns, Camille Song of Love (1947), 55
Danse macabre, 109 A Song to Remember (1943), 55
Liszt’s relationship with/influence on, 43 Song Without End (1960), 55
transcriptions of, 99 (see also Index of Liszt’s Sorabji, Kaikhosru, 37
Musical Works: Transcriptions and Spohr, Louis, Violin Concerto no. 8 in A minor,
arrangements) 156
Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, Comte Spontini, Gasparo Luigi Pacifico, 59, 232,
de, 10, 11, 12 268
Sand, George, 1, 267 Stasov, Vladimir, 170
Lettres d’un voyageur, 3, 66 Steiner, George, 193
Liszt’s letters to, 3, 11 Steinway, Henry, 176, 187
Sauer, Emil von, 35, 179, 190 Stephen, Leslie, 17–18, 19
Sayn-Wittgenstein, Carolyne zu, Fürstin, 13, Stradal, August, 47, 106, 179
46, 47, 216, 222 Strauss, Richard,
dedications to, 66, 206 Liszt’s influence on, 38–40
Liszt’s letters to, 14, 88–90, 98, 112, 121, 132, Stravinsky, Igor, 44
135–6, 147, 232 Suk, Josef, 44
relationship with Liszt, 194, 214, 219–20, Sulyok, Imre, 34
258, 265 Suttoni, Charles, 12
Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von, 67, Szabolcsi, Bence, 50
196 Széchenyi, István, 127
Die Ideale, 213 see also Index of Liszt’s Musical Works:
see also Index of Liszt’s Musical Works: Historical Hungarian Portraits
Lieder Szelenyi, István, 50
Schilling, Gustav, 15–16
Schillings, Max von, 39 Táborszky, Ferdinand, 109, 126–7
Schindler, Anton, 21–2 Tausig, Carl, Ungarische Zigeunerweise, 185
Schlegel, Friedrich, 6–7 Tchaikovsky, Piotr, 102
Schlesinger, Maurice, 1, 2, 12 Teleki, Ladislaus, 127
Schmalhausen, Lina, x see also Index of Liszt’s Musical Works:
Schnapp, Friedrich, 47 Historical Hungarian Portraits
Schoenberg, Arnold, 31, 39, 42–3 Tennyson, Alfred Lord see Index of Liszt’s
Schubert, Franz, 58, 107, 174, 263 Musical Works: Lieder
Liszt’s comments on, 57 Thalberg, Sigismond, 5, 65, 72, 74, 75, 81–2,
transcriptions of, 61–2, 194, 205 (see also 83, 152, 189
Index of Liszt’s Musical Works: Thomas, Theodore, 45
Transcriptions and arrangements) Tibbetts, John, 55
Ave Maria, 111 Tolstoy, Nikolai see Index of Liszt’s Musical
Schwanengesang, 208 Works: Lieder
Wanderer-Fantasy, 77, 160 Torkewitz, Dieter, 49
Schumann, Clara, née Wieck, 64, 83, 99, 158, ‘Trionfo della Morte’ (fresco), 162, 165–7, 169
182
Schumann, Robert, 2, 33, 64, 79, 81, 99, Uhland, Ludwig see Index of Liszt’s Musical
113–14, 159–60, 176 Works: Lieder
comments on Liszt, 8, 57, 60, 63, 65–6
Liszt’s comments on, 78, 160 Venantius Fortunatus, 122
Dichterliebe, 198 verbunkos (Hungarian dance), 214
Schwind, Moritz von, 231 Verdi, Giuseppe, 13
Scitovsky, János, Archbishop, 229 transcriptions of, 99–102 (see also Index of
Searle, Humphrey, 48, 266 Liszt’s Musical Works: Transcriptions
Senancour, Etienne Pivert de, 68 and arrangements)
Shakespeare, William, 215 Requiem, 237
Shaw, George Bernard, 84 Vianna da Motta, José, 33–4, 152, 153, 170, 179
282 General index
Vigny, Alfred de, 1 Watson, Derek, 51

Villa d’Este, as Liszt’s residence, 86, 135–6 Liszt, x
Viñes, Riccardo, 43 Weber, Carl Maria von, 78, 81
Virgil (P. Vergilius Maro), Aeneid, 142, 143 Konzertstück, 154, 158, 160, 173
Vörösmarty, Mihály, 107, 127–8 Rondo in E, 173
see also Index of Liszt’s Musical Works: Sonata in E minor, 68
Historical Hungarian Portraits see also Index of Liszt’s Musical Works:
Transcriptions and arrangements
Wagner, Cosima, née Liszt (daughter), 29, 46, Wegelius, Martin, 36, 44–5
137, 142 Weimar
Wagner, Daniela (Liszt’s granddaughter), 137 Liszt Museum, 47
Wagner, Richard, 12, 31, 48, 49, 206 as Liszt’s place of employment, 70, 86,
comments on Liszt, ix, 76, 222 206
death, 87, 113, 145 Weingartner, Felix, 190
dedications to, 220 Weissheimer, Wendelin, 264
Liszt’s views on, 89, 150 Wieck, Clara see Schumann, Clara
relationship with Cosima, 137, 142 Wild, Earl, 37
relationship with Liszt, 13, 29, 204, 206 Williams, Adrian,
transcriptions of, 99 (see also Index of Liszt’s Franz Liszt: Selected Letters, x
Musical Works: Transcriptions and A Portrait of Liszt by Himself and His
arrangements) Contemporaries, x
Lohengrin, 184 Winkler, Gerhard, 53
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, 83–4 Winklhofer, Sharon, 48
Parsifal, 113, 150, 245, 246 Wolf, Hugo, 42, 256
Tristan und Isolde, 139, 140, 197, 201 Wolff, O. F. Bernhard, 25–7
Walker, Alan, 48, 114, 115, 255, 266
The Death of Franz Liszt, x Zichy, Mihály, Count, 215
Liszt, 3 vols., ix–x, 14, 15, 19, 48, 53 Zychowicz, James, 42

(Cambridge Companions To Music) Hamilton, Kenneth (Ed.) - The Cambridge Companion To Liszt-Cambridge University Press (2005)

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(Cambridge Companions To Music) Hamilton, Kenneth (Ed.) - The Cambridge Companion To Liszt-Cambridge University Press (2005)

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The Cambridge Companion to Liszt

This Companion provides an up-to-date view of the music of Franz

ken n et h h a m i lto n is pianist-in-residence and senior lecturer in

First published 2005

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

ISBN-13 978-0-521-62204-2 hardback

ISBN-13 978-0-521-64462-4 paperback

List of illustrations [page vi]

1 Liszt: the Romantic artist Katharine Ellis [1]

Twentieth Century (2001). He is currently working on a study of monumentality

The Cambridge Companion to Liszt presents a survey and contextualisation

1811 – Liszt born on 22 October in Raiding, in a largely German-speaking part of

1834 – Composes Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, three Apparitions and an essay

1853 – Sonata in B Minor, Ballade in B Minor and Festklänge completed. Brahms

nevertheless the bedrock on which a lifelong spirituality and sense of social

The artist as alienated wanderer

How wretched, how truly wretched we artists are! We experience

instrumental music, and thereby intensifying his allegiance to German

Liszt and Hoffmann: the divided self

The rhetoric of the sublime

in a move which Hoffmann was to emulate in his famous comparison of

during La vestale and finally committing suicide because he has experienced

Whether or not the storm occurred as de la Rive-Necker described it, the

Byron but dominated by a bust of Beethoven (in whose general direction he

of sheet music lead us to Beethoven’s world of the infinite. In this fusion

Religiosity and social vision: the artist as priest

The Romantic afterburn

audacity which characterised his intellectual and performing lives during

In what has become a famous letter to Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-

I have many biographical things to overturn and to correct: Gustav Schilling

greatness and autobiography in the later nineteenth century, which can be

1. Autobiography is invariably a good read.

[A]n enormous amount of his music was confessional – in a way, the

least debatable how successfully such a purely musical biography could be

contradictions. In short, that which would be too incredible for fiction

It should be added, in all fairness, that Breidenstein had greatly annoyed

If the Prince represents his people

It is important to note that Wolff’s text withholds Beethoven’s name until

autobiography – the Beethoven statue plays a prominent role. In fact, when

Introduction: the problem of Liszt

they had an impact upon individuals and groups of individuals. Harold

his circle of acquaintances, contemporary reviews and reports in the press),

mounted the major German commemoration for Liszt in 1961. Character-

scholars like Peter Raabe and Berthold Kellermann.20 The significance of

produced a valuable study of the Sonata in B Minor,41 while Howard –

On the other, Strauss himself repeatedly attributed his knowledge of Liszt

including symmetrical and other non-tonal harmonies, open form, and

subjective interpretation of the sources and incorporates a number of fac-

Lisztrezeption dominated by the view of him as a shallow composer of flashy

Beginning in the 1920s, French writers took an active role in advancing

the primary interests seemed to reside in publishing primary documents

of press reports about Liszt’s German tours, Liszt in Germany 1840–1845

Raff’s description of this work as an ‘arrangement’ is glaringly unjust (its

grand gesture. A similar type of opening is found in the 1824 Impromptu

If I am not mistaken I have begun something quite different with my

What I undertook in the Berlioz symphony I am now setting out to do for

Liszt had already finished his transcriptions of Beethoven’s symphonies

In fact, Liszt’s transcription of Berlioz’s symphony remained the only

The transformation of piano technique

Following a typically Romantic conception of the ‘artist’, Liszt seems as much

Album d’un voyageur/Années de pèlerinage :

of arrangements of and fantasies on Swiss folk melodies or themes by Swiss