Program notes by Eric Bromberger

Un sospiro from Trois Études de Concert, S.144/3
Franz LISZT
Born October 22, 1811, Raiding, Austria
Died July 31, 1886, Bayreuth, Germany

In 1848 Liszt wrote Three Concert Études, each of which presents a pianist with different technical challenges. The third of these études, in D-flat major, has become the best-known of the set. Outwardly, the piece is melodic and for the most part subdued, with the main theme heard above (and sometimes below) liquid, murmuring textures. Liszt marks it Allegro affettuoso (“affectionate”) and further specifies that it should be dolce con grazia. Yet the music’s gentle nature masks the fact that it presents a performer with some daunting technical challenges. The pianist must solve problems with hand-crossings and arpeggios (much of the piece is written on three staves) while still projecting the simple and beguiling character of the main melody. The piece is brief, but it moves through a variety of keys as it proceeds, and at one point Liszt offers a virtuoso outburst marked quasi cadenza as well as another passage marked quasi arpa: “like a harp.” Finally the music fades into silence on quiet chords. This piece may sound simple, but achieving that simplicity is a difficult matter indeed.

This étude is universally known by the nickname Un sospiro–“A Sigh”–a title that did not originate with Liszt. He was aware of it, but never used it himself.

Hungarian Rhapsody No. 3 in B-flat Major, S.244/3

Though he was born in what is now Hungary, Liszt left his homeland as a boy and declared himself a citizen of Europe at large: his career as a performing virtuoso took him from Ireland to Russia, from Spain to Turkey, and he lived for extended periods in Paris, Switzerland, and Rome. In his late twenties, however, Liszt rediscovered his Hungarian roots. The plight of Hungarian flood victims moved him to give benefit concerts on their behalf, and when he returned to Budapest in 1839, he found himself a national hero. Now, fired with national sentiment, he embarked on a study of Hungarian music and made Hungarian tunes the basis of fifteen Hungarian Rhapsodies, largely composed between 1851 and 1853 (later he came back and wrote four more). Since that time, there has been much debate about the authenticity of these tunes, about what is gypsy music and what is not, and about just how Hungarian this music really is. Such a debate is beside the point, for the real issue is not the source or authenticity of the material but what Liszt does with it, and there is no question that his Hungarian Rhapsodies offer some of his most rousing and characteristic piano music.

The Hungarian Rhapsody No. 3 is one of the shortest of Liszt’s rhapsodies, and it depends for much of its effect on a sharp contrast of piano sounds. The opening Andante, which Liszt specifies should be played pesante espressivo, is set in the instrument’s deepest register–in fact, both hands are written in bass clef. This dark sound, full of the starting and stopping typical gypsy music, sets the stage for the Allegretto, where the music leaps into the piano’s shining high register. Both hands are in treble clef here, and the staccato writing gives this music a sparkling, delicate sonority. But just as quickly the music returns to its dark and deep opening section. Liszt alternates these quite different kinds of music across the brief span of this piece, and along the way he flirts with unusual harmonies, building passages out of chords built simultaneously on major and minor thirds.

Piano Sonata in B Minor, S.178

Liszt wrote his Sonata in B Minor in 1852-3 and dedicated it to Robert Schumann. The first public performance took place four years later in Berlin in 1857, when it was played by Liszt’s son-in-law Hans von Bülow. The Sonata in B Minor is in all senses of the word a revolutionary work, for Liszt sets aside previous notions of sonata form and looks ahead to a new vision of what such a form might be. Schumann himself, then in serious mental decline, reportedly never heard the piece but could not have been especially comfortable with the dedication of a piece of music that flew so directly in the face of his own sense of what a sonata should be. Another figure in nineteenth-century music, however, reacted rapturously: Wagner wrote to Liszt to say, “The Sonata is beautiful beyond any conception; great, pleasing, profound and noble–it is sublime, just as you are yourself.”

The most immediately distinctive feature of the Sonata is that it is in one movement instead of the traditional three. Beyond this, it is built not on long and distinct melodic themes but on short phrases. These phrases undergo a gradual but extensive development–a process Liszt called “the transformation of themes”–and are often made to perform quite varied functions as they undergo these transformations. Despite the one-movement structure, Liszt achieves something of the effect of the traditional three-movement form by giving the sonata a general fast-slow-fast shape. The entire sonata is built on just four brief theme-phrases: the slowly-descending scale heard at the very beginning; the leaping theme in octaves at the Allegro; a powerful theme over repeated eighth-notes marked Grandioso; and a lyric fourth phrase marked cantando expressivo, itself an expanded version of the martial repeated notes of the opening.

The Sonata in B Minor is extremely dramatic music, so dramatic that many guessed that it must have a program, as so much of Liszt’s music does. But Liszt insisted that this is not descriptive or programmatic music. He wanted his sonata accepted as a piece of “pure music,” to be heard and understood for itself.

Bagatelle ohne Tonart, S.216a
En Rêve, S.207
La Lugubre Gondola II, S.200
Schlaflos, Frage und Antwort, S.203

These four brief pieces come from the final years of Liszt’s long life: he wrote all of them when he was in his early seventies. Liszt’s career as a touring virtuoso was now long in the past, and in these final years his efforts to “hurl my javelin into the infinite space of the future” (as he defined his mission as a composer) led him to compose music that might best be called experimental–these pieces bring new conceptions of form, sound, and harmony.

Bagatelle ohne Tonart was composed in 1885, the year before Liszt’s death, but it was not published until 1956, seventy years after his death–the manuscript was discovered in the Liszt Museum in Weimar. There is evidence that this music was originally planned as Liszt’s Fourth Mephisto Waltz (it bears a superficial resemblance to that sequence), but the composer finally came to see it as a separate work. That title translates as “Bagatelle without Tonality,” yet this is not atonal music: the piece does hover around tonal centers, but it refuses ever to settle into a home tonality. Exotic, playful, and willful, the Bagatelle rushes to an unexpected ending, one that resolves nothing.

Two of these pieces have to do with the night. Liszt called En Rêve (“Dreaming”) a nocturne and marked this gentle music Andantino. Over a quietly-rocking accompaniment, an innocent melody is announced simply by the pianist’s right hand. While retaining its innocence, this music moves far afield harmonically, then concludes quietly, almost wistfully.

La lugubre gondola II is the second version of a piece Liszt had originally composed in Venice in December 1882. Inspired by a procession of funeral gondolas, it was written only two months before Wagner died in Venice (his body was then transported across the city by these gondolas). This music also exists in a version for either violin or cello with piano, and it has been pointed out that the composer probably did not care in which form it was performed–he was more interested in this piece as theoretical music than as a work that might exploit the sound of a particular instrument.

Inspired by a poem of Raab, Schlaflos, Frage und Antwort (“Sleepless, Question and Answer”) is the other night-piece in this set, and it dates from March 1883. The unsettling, rippling textures of the opening give way to a consonant, consoling close.

Transcendental Étude No. 10 in F Minor, S.139/10

Liszt’s phenomenally difficult Transcendental Études have a complex history. He began work in 1824 (at age 13!) on what was planned as a cycle of 48 Études in all the major and minor keys, but when the set was published in 1826 it consisted of only twelve. Liszt came back to this music a dozen years later–at the height of his career as one of the greatest piano virtuosos ever–and completely revised these pieces, in the process transforming them into some of the most difficult music ever written for the piano. In his review of the 1838 version, Robert Schumann called the Études “studies in storm and dread for, at the most, ten or twelve players in the world.” Liszt then returned to this music one more time: he revised the Études again and published this version in 1852 under the title Études d’execution transcendante. This edition–the one almost always performed today–thus represents Liszt’s final thoughts on music he had been working on all of his life.

Liszt gave ten of the Études descriptive titles, but the Étude No. 10 in F Minor has none. However, the pianist-composer Ferruccio Busoni, who edited one early edition of the Transcendental Études, felt that it deserved the nickname “Appassionato.” Liszt marks the Étude Allegro agitato molto, but his instructions within the music make its dramatic nature even clearer: accentato ed appassionato assai, tempestoso, disperato, and precipitato. This is turbulent, dramatic music, full of rippling triplets, chordal writing that stretches to the extreme ends of the keyboard, and extended passages in octaves. Through all this fury runs a haunting melody that brings some peace amidst the pianistic fireworks.

Grand Études after Paganini, S.140/5 and 6 No. 5 in E Major (La Chasse) No. 6 in A Minor

In April 1832, twenty-year-old Franz Liszt heard the great violinist Niccolò Paganini play in Paris, and the young man was thunderstruck by both the music and the man. Here was a violinist–perhaps the greatest who ever lived–who had pushed his instrument to the absolute limit of its possibilities. And here was an artist surrounded by the most mysterious and malevolent atmosphere. Paganini’s gaunt appearance and secretive manner had given rise to rumors that trailed behind him like some smoky nightmare: people believed that he had sold his soul to the devil (there were those who swore they saw sparks flying from his bow when he played) or that he had murdered his mistress and had made the G-string of his violin–famous for its opulent sound–from her intestine. Young Liszt had heard all the rumors, and now he heard Paganini play. The effect was like a concussion. To a friend he wrote: “what a man, what a violin, what an artist! Heavens! What sufferings, what misery, what tortures in those four strings!”

Liszt promptly paid Paganini the sincerest compliments possible: he imitated some of the violinist’s stage manner, he too attempted to push his instrument to its limits, and he wrote music based on the music of Paganini. The most famous of this music is Liszt’s monumentally difficult set of Six Grand Études after Paganini, composed in 1838 and then revised in 1851 to make them a little less impossible to perform. Five of these Études are based on Paganini’s Twenty-four Caprices for Solo Violin, while the other is the famous La Campanella, derived from the last movement of Paganini’s Violin Concerto No. 2 in B Minor. Liszt’s Six Études are essentially transcriptions for piano of Paganini’s violin pieces, but created in such a way to make them just as difficult for pianists as Paganini’s original versions were for violinists.

No. 5 in E Major is based on Paganini’s Caprice No. 9, and Liszt preserves Paganini’s nickname “La Chasse” for this study, which does imitate the sound of the hunt, with the calls sounded first by flutes, then by horns, and then extended throughout the piece. The Étude No. 6 in A Minor is a transcription of the most famous caprice of them all, No. 24, which has haunted composers ever since Paganini’s Caprices were heard for the first time. Just as Brahms, Rachmaninoff, and others have written variations on this haunting theme, so does Paganini: he announces his theme and then creates ten variations. This is one of the most difficult violin pieces ever written, and Liszt makes it just as difficult for the pianist, who must master octave passages and supply some complex counterpoint to the original theme as this exciting music powers its way to a thunderous close.