Franz Liszt (1811 – 1886): Piano Sonata in B Minor
Few figures in nineteenth century classical music have divided opinion as Franz Liszt did. It seemed you either revered or ridiculed him, and quite often for the same reasons. And yet you couldn’t ignore him. In the 1850s, he was probably the most important composer in Europe. He was certainly one of the most innovative and influential.
With his concert-giving heyday (Glanzzeit) having left him a wealthy man, Liszt could now, to a degree, play the part of both artist and patron. And there was hardly a musical current that did not engage his attention: he was curious about almost everything, from “classical” masters like Bach and Beethoven, to the avant-garde firebrands of his day, to ancient forms of Gregorian chant, to the traditional Romani music of Hungary. The only thing he occasionally chafed against was musical conservatism, an attitude that would briefly land him in trouble with a group of German reactionaries in the early 1860s.
There was also a curious quality to Liszt that appeared to hate being too much of one thing or another. Whenever he felt he had gone so far in one direction, he would suddenly veer off on an opposite course and become something quite different. It might partly explain his various career metamorphoses, from earnest, embryonic virtuoso, to bad boy rock star, to sober court kapellmeister, to cassock-wearing cleric. Whether Franz Liszt ever experienced an inner conflict over who he really was, it did not appear to bother him very much. Post Glanzzeit, he would impose hard work and sometimes austerity on an existence he could have afforded to live out in any way he pleased. Yet a certain light-heartedness always lingered in the background.
Initially it was a craving to be taken more seriously by his peers – a desire “to reach that level of superior and solid renown” as he put it – that would impel him to forsake the concert stage and adoring audiences for a more focused creative life. As well as wanting to spend more time composing, he had come to believe (perhaps influenced by Felix Mendelssohn’s example at Leipzig) that a musician should ultimately be prepared to serve his community. Génie obligé, he would say – genius carries obligations.
Liszt’s transition from concert performer to court musician did not happen overnight. Although he was first appointed Kapellmeister Extraordinaire to the central Germany city of Weimar in 1842 (following the recent death of its previous famous incumbent, JN Hummel), he was only initially engaged for three months per year. Given his wild reputation and complete lack of experience for the role, the appointment was initially greeted by a certain skepticism among the city’s residents. Liszt characteristically took the early brickbats in his stride, even if they did not bode particularly well for the future.
The role only became more full-time when Liszt finally decided to retire from his years of concertizing in 1847. It was partly down to a new love interest in his life – the Polish noblewoman, Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, who knew a great man when she saw one, and who would give Liszt much emotional, practical (and sometimes financial) support in the years ahead. She already had a reputation for being a good listener – Berlioz would call her a “woman of great sympathy and intelligence who has often sustained me in my darkest hours.” She would remain Liszt’s main romantic partner for the rest of his life, even if for various practical reasons, the two would never quite manage to tie the knot.
After living initially on Carolyne’s estate in Voronivtsi (now situated in Ukraine), the couple moved to Weimar in 1848 where Liszt eagerly took up his new duties. The decade or so he was to spend in the city would become as important to his life as his Glanzzeit years. It was here he came of age as a creative artist, writing much of his best music, as well as developing into an outstanding conductor and administrator. And this in spite of the whole thing turning, at times, into something of a traumatic experience, what he would later refer to as the “twelve years of agitation, of fights, of passion in Weimar.”
There were two fundamental problems that he and Carolyne experienced from the start and which never quite went away. The first was that both were committed Catholics living in an overwhelmingly Protestant city, and both would be regularly pressurized by high-ranking clergy to convert. The second was their living together as a ménage à deux, which wasn’t however their fault – both parties genuinely wanted to get married but had been barred by the unwillingness of Carolyn’s estranged husband to grant her a divorce. There were still many in Weimar who basically regarded Liszt as an immoral heretic, and who struggled to accommodate him. When Liszt once made some indiscreet comments about the small-mindedness of the city, he was briefly threatened with jail after his remarks had been reported back to the authorities.
Such an incident was perhaps typical of the mild ill-treatment Liszt would often experience in the city. He could even be exploited by those who should have been his allies. His employer, the grand Duke of Weimar, never paid him a regular salary, instead subjecting his prize musician to irregular “ad hoc” payments, which sometimes netted him a smaller income than those of his orchestral musicians. Liszt would jokingly call it is his “cigar money”, though he protested non too vehemently. He was smart enough to recognize that being employed on a slightly more amateur footing allowed him greater freedoms than a standard court servant. Desiring little more than to be allowed to get on with his job in peace, he would bring all his supreme talent, charisma and entrepreneurial spirit to his duties at Weimar, allowing him to transform the city’s musical life in the years ahead.
Beating something of an evangelical drum, he would imperiously ride out to the towns and villages around Weimar and persuade the local musicians to get involved with his various projects, presenting them as a kind of higher cause around which they should all unite. His objective, which he would largely succeed in meeting, was to create a major new European centre for musical excellence, showcasing a huge range of repertoire from forgotten classics to the avant-garde.
As conductor of the Weimar orchestra and choir, Liszt would become famous for his championing of leading modernists like Hector Berlioz and Richard Wagner, along with younger acolytes such as Peter Cornelius, Julius Reubke, Hans von Bülow and Joachim Raff, all of them receiving generous help and support from the maestro. But Liszt was never exclusive about his musical tastes, and at the same time would promote much more “classical” composers such as Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann. Despite being personally and artistically quite different from the latter (and once almost coming to blows with him during an altercation at a party), Liszt always retained a genuine respect for Schumann’s music, once privately commenting that he was “a musician who must be rated highly and studied closely if one wants to be well-informed about the most polished and best compositions of the last dozen years”. In 1855, he would make a valiant attempt to revive Schumann’s only opera Genoveva at Weimar.
Liszt may have been almost unique in his ability to keep art and artists separate in his mind. Indeed, he saw it as his duty to extract music from any talented composer he met, no matter what else he might think of them. In doing so, he would put at their disposal not only his highly skilled orchestra but also his own wallet. Certain composers, on receiving such generous help, would come to feel like Liszt’s Chosen One – until they discovered their great benefactor was helping several others in exactly the same way.
Of all of Liszt’s protégés, it was probably Richard Wagner who benefitted most from his support in the 1850s. Wagner was then living in exile, a persona non grata in Germany after playing an active part in the 1849 Dresden civil uprising. Although he would eventually be pardoned and allowed to return to his country in 1862, it was largely Liszt who kept his flame alive in the intervening years, programming much of his music, and regularly conducting recent operas such as Lohengrin and Tannhäuser. When criticized for supporting a man still widely regarded as a musical and political radical, Liszt’s typical response was to shrug his shoulders and say Hier Stehe ich, ich kan kann nicht anders (Here I stand, I can not do otherwise).
But even as Weimar’s indefatigable Kapellmeister selflessly performed all of these duties, his own compositions were flourishing as never before. His furious desire to keep evolving as a composer was no doubt inspired by much of the exciting new music he was promoting: it probably helped keep his own creativity at the forefront of avant-garde. Aside from his ever-expanding harmonic palate, he was striving to create new textures not only on the piano, but also in his orchestral writing. Alongside this, the ever more intricate layers of thematic development in his larger works were to have a great influence on the leitmotif principles underpinning Wagner’s mature operas, as well as on late nineteenth century symphonic music in general.
One of Liszt’s greatest achievements during these years was his pioneering of a new form of composition which he called a Symphonische Dichtung (Symphonic Poem or Tone Poem): a programmatic work for orchestra more substantial than an overture, yet shorter than a symphony, and evoking a (usually romantic) literary, pictorial or dramatic theme. Arguably his greatest contributions to the genre would be Tasso (1849, based on a drama by Goethe), Les Préludes (1854, based on a Lamartine poem), Mazeppa (1854, Victor Hugo) and Orpheus (also 1854, used as an introduction to the first Weimar performance of Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Euridice). Such works would go on to inspire later tone-poem composers such as Smetana, Dvorak, Sibelius and Richard Strauss.
Alongside the dozen tone poems Liszt wrote during his time at Weimar, he would add two symphonies, also carrying literary themes – the Dante Symphony (1856) and Faust Symphony (1857). Last but not least would come one of his very greatest works, the Piano Sonata in B Minor.
Completed at the age of 42, and dedicated interestingly enough not to Wagner or one of Liszt’s Weimar acolytes but to Robert Schumann, the Sonata seems to combine all the best things about the younger and older Liszt. While it has all the great romantic drive and dramatic mood contrasts of his youth, his control over the music’s extremely diverse material is now that of a master. Over the course of the Sonata, he displays a level of meticulous, mathematical craftsmanship that even the likes of Beethoven or Brahms would have been proud of.
Although it’s a single-movement work lasting thirty minutes, the four-movement structure of a classic sonata is discernible – the first section, a kind of extended fantasia for piano, follows much the same structure of the Dante Sonata written five years earlier, with its alternating moods of passion and serenity. The second section (starting at 12’18) is the “slow movement” of the piece, a soft reverie with a gently improvisatory manner. After the fast fugue that makes up the third section (19’37), the final section (21’13) is a varied repeat of the first, this time with a different (and quite surprising) conclusion.
Structural considerations aside, the most striking feature of the Sonata is that, for all its monumental dimensions, it is almost solely based on just three thematic ideas (or motifs), all of which are presented within the first minute or so. Thereafter each motif is used and re-used in the most imaginative ways, at times on the surface and audible, at other times so deeply woven into the overall musical fabric that the effect is much more subconscious. An integral part of the Sonata’s dramatic narrative, the three motifs create a deeply satisfying structural unity.
They are, respectively, the very opening – those slow and sinister-sounding downward scales. Then comes the “main” dramatic melody at (0’53), which we will hear in various guises throughout the piece. Finally, there is the ostinato-like bass figure at 1’06, which Liszt will later slow down to half its speed and transform into one of the great romantic themes of the Sonata (see 5’44).
Pretty much everything that now follows in the piece is directly linked to the three ideas you hear in the opening bars. For a man who had so often stood for musical excess and profligacy in his younger days, the Sonata is, by any standards, an astonishingly economical piece of musical craftsmanship. The miracle is that it also manages to be so imaginative and varied.
Alongside its chronological near neighbours, the Dante and Faust Symphonies, the B Minor Piano Sonata in many ways represents the peak of Liszt the composer. Still in his mid-forties, one might have expected many more works like it – and yet oddly he would never again maintain such a creative surge in his life. It was as if the Weimar role, for all its demands and frustrations, had given him extra inspiration, while also becoming a demanding balancing act he could keep up for only so long.
When the old duke of Weimar had died in 1853, his successor was far less interested in Liszt and in music in general. Over the next half decade, Liszt would find official support for his projects gradually evaporating. He was particularly frustrated by the new duke’s unwillingness to consider a major new music school in Weimar (although it can’t have helped when Liszt proposed Wagner – then a wanted felon by the German state – as one of the star teachers).
On a personal level, he and Carolyne – still unmarried, still Catholic – had continued to face problems fitting into the more conservative sides to Weimar life. One of Liszt’s finest biographers, Alan Walker, has suggested that Liszt gave almost too much of himself to Weimar, in the end and certainly far more than the city ever gave back to him. As he puts it, “disdained by his peers and misunderstood by the great public, he gradually become an isolated figure. That he recognized his fate, and accepted it, is the true meaning of his Weimar years. The thirteen summers that he spent in the city were for him a period of slow martyrdom.” Walker would even compare Liszt’s time in Weimar to Gulliver’s ill-fated encounter with the tiny island race of Lilliput.
Liszt finally and inevitably stepped away from the role in 1859. Just as quickly, his star, which had blazed away so brightly for the past two decades, now began to wane a little. He suffered a further series of setbacks, most tragically with the deaths of two of his three children, Daniel and Blandine (both in early adulthood). He also remained unable to marry Carolyne, with one final attempt to have the Catholic church intervene to annul Carolyne’s former marriage ending in failure. The couple eventually decided to live apart in order to avoid further scandal.
A more professional controversy arrived in the early 1860s when Liszt found himself the target of a manifesto, written by Johannes Brahms, Clara Schumann and others, denouncing the modernist ideals of himself and his “Weimar School”.
The whole rumpus had its origins in Clara’s resentment at seeing her husband’s old magazine, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (New Journal of Music) fall into the hands of musical radicals, under the editorship of one Franz Brendel. Clara was particularly annoyed by the Neue Zeitschrift’s cloying partisanship towards Liszt (a man she had never personally taken to) and by the aggressive polemic of some of its most recent articles. Even the avant-garde Berlioz would describe the movement as “that crazy school of the ‘Music of the Future.'”*
*Berlioz would also add that “they stick to it, and want me to be their leader and standard-bearer, but I write nothing, say nothing, but just let them go their way. Good sense will teach reasonable people the truth.”
The ensuing (and faintly ridiculous) disputation – largely playing out in the manner of two gentlemen’s clubs brandishing monocles at one another rather than serious ideological debate – would last a generation, and create a huge, unnecessary schism between the music of Wagner and Brahms. But Liszt would also get hurt in some of the crossfire, causing him further stress and heartache.
It was perhaps unsurprising that Liszt appeared to lose something of his old ebullience at around this time. He turned increasingly to the Catholic church for consolation, moving to Rome in 1861 and taking lodgings in a small, spartan monastery just outside the city. He would go so far as to take minor holy orders in 1865 (later receiving a tonsure, a traditional monks’ haircut), with Pope Pius XI conferring on him the title, “Abbé Liszt”, even if he would always stop short of becoming a fully ordained priest”* In all, Liszt was “convinced that this act would strengthen me in the right road.”
*The (probably apocryphal) story goes that Liszt was personally discouraged from doing so by Pius XI, after an incident in which Liszt had been asked to play the piano by some nuns following a service in the Sistine Chapel. When the nuns subsequently threw themselves at the old maestro and covered his face with amorous kisses, the pope decided it might be best to keep Liszt away from them in future.
For the last seventeen years of his life, Liszt divided his time between three important compass points, living what he called his “vie trifurquée” (tripartite existence). Aside from Rome, he returned to do more public work in Weimar, having patched things up with his old employers. He also began to spend more time in Hungary, the country of his birth, keen to rediscover his roots in spite of knowing so little of his native tongue. As he told a friend in 1873, “please allow me that, apart from my regrettable ignorance of the Hungarian language, I remain Hungarian in my heart and soul from birth to the grave; consequently, I earnestly wish to further the cause of Hungarian music culture.”
Subsequently he helped establish the Royal National Hungarian Academy of Music in Budapest in 1875. He also wrote a little treatise entitled Des Bohémiens et de Leur Musique en Hongrie (translated loosely in its English edition “The Gipsy in Music”), which sought to recognize and promote the musical traditions of the Romani people in his homeland.
As for his compositional output, it was not quite as prolific as before, while his later music would fail to attain the popularity of his earlier works. Partly it was changed priorities and a new austerity to his musical style. Partly it was a matter of practicalities, as he once explained he had “become terribly scrupulous and cautious in discharging my profession of musician. In order to go on writing I have to put everything else aside, and the setting down of my ideas, as such, takes an amount of time vastly disproportionate to their slight value. Moreover, there is then the matter of correcting copies and proof, the preliminary and dress rehearsals, correspondence with publishers, proof-readers, engravers, and a whole lot of endless worries imposed on me by the art and the craft of sound.”
Reflecting his new stage of life, he wrote a good deal of sacred music – aside from over fifty motets, there were his oratorios Die Legende von der heiligen Elisabeth (1862) and Christus (1866), and his cantata Via Crucis (1879). A new, plainer, simpler, less sentimental style is now evident in these works, while Via Crucis is also filled with harmonic dissonances that are strikingly novel for 1879.
His late piano music would follow a similar course, now stark and introverted, and entirely shorn of its old virtuosic showmanship. Such works as Nuages Gris (1881) and Bagatelle Sans Tonalité (1885) are as forward-looking as anything being written in the 1880s. Liszt had had a lifetime of seeing his music abused, and he once asked tentatively of these later pieces, “is one allowed to write, or listen to, such things?”
Despite the more sombre tone of his later life, there was no chance of Liszt ever donning a hairshirt. Nor did ever quite shake off his womanizing reputation – some would even dub the white-haired old cleric “Mephistopheles in a cassock”. The American music critic Harold C Schonberg may have been a little unkind when he suggested that Liszt “never took his religion very seriously. He only made a great show of taking it seriously” – but he was not totally off the mark either.
Although frail in his final years, Liszt kept busy, still writing, still seeing friends and attending concerts and still travelling. His end finally came while visiting Bayreuth for an annual Wagner festival in the summer of 1886, where he was taken ill and soon after succumbed to a combination of pneumonia and heart failure.
Unquestionably his death marked the end of an era: as a part of the generation of Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Chopin and Wagner, he was the last of the early romantics. And for many, the most influential. Bela Bartók, whose early piano music owes much to Liszt, once wrote, “Liszt’s works had a more fertilizing influence on the following generations than Wagner’s… [He] touched upon so many new possibilities in his works, without being able to exhaust them utterly, that he provided an incomparably greater stimulus…”
It is perhaps why Franz Liszt, for all his brilliance and personal complexities, his foibles and controversies, has always seemed to have something fresh to say to each new generation of music-lovers.