Late works (Liszt) - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The radical change Franz Liszt

Franz Liszt

Franz Liszt ; ), was a 19th-century Hungarian composer, pianist, conductor, and teacher.Liszt became renowned in Europe during the nineteenth century for his virtuosic skill as a pianist. He was said by his contemporaries to have been the most technically advanced pianist of his age...

's compositional style underwent in the last 20 years of his life was unprecedented in Western classical music. The tradition of music had been one of unified progression, even to the extent of Johannes Brahms

Johannes Brahms

Johannes Brahms was a German composer and pianist, and one of the leading musicians of the Romantic period. Born in Hamburg, Brahms spent much of his professional life in Vienna, Austria, where he was a leader of the musical scene...

' First Symphony

Symphony No. 1 (Brahms)

The Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68, is a symphony written by Johannes Brahms. Brahms spent at least fourteen years completing this work, whose sketches date from 1854. Brahms himself declared that the symphony, from sketches to finishing touches, took 21 years, from 1855 to 1876...

being known as "Beethoven's Tenth". Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven was a German composer and pianist. A crucial figure in the transition between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western art music, he remains one of the most famous and influential composers of all time.Born in Bonn, then the capital of the Electorate of Cologne and part of...

's own three periods of composition are monolithic and united. Liszt's, by comparison, seem deconstructivist

Deconstructivism

Deconstructivism is a development of postmodern architecture that began in the late 1980s. It is characterized by ideas of fragmentation, an interest in manipulating ideas of a structure's surface or skin, non-rectilinear shapes which serve to distort and dislocate some of the elements of...

. Replacing pages which in Liszt's earlier compositions had been thick with notes and virtuoso

Virtuoso

A virtuoso is an individual who possesses outstanding technical ability in the fine arts, at singing or playing a musical instrument. The plural form is either virtuosi or the Anglicisation, virtuosos, and the feminine form sometimes used is virtuosa...

passages was a starkness where every note and rest was carefully weighed and calculated, while the works themselves become more experimental harmonically.

At the same time, no other 19th century composer offers the thinking musician such a brimming cornucopia

Cornucopia

The cornucopia or horn of plenty is a symbol of abundance and nourishment, commonly a large horn-shaped container overflowing with produce, flowers, nuts, other edibles, or wealth in some form...

of forward-looking technical devices. Works such as Bagatelle sans tonalité
Bagatelle sans tonalité
Bagatelle sans tonalité is a piece for solo piano written by Franz Liszt in 1885. The manuscript bears the title "Fourth Mephisto Waltz" and may have been intended to replace the piece now known as the Fourth Mephisto Waltz when it appeared Liszt would not be able to finish it; the phrase...

("Bagatelle without Tonality") foreshadow in intent, if not in exact manner, composers who would further explore the modern concept of atonality

Atonality

Atonality in its broadest sense describes music that lacks a tonal center, or key. Atonality in this sense usually describes compositions written from about 1908 to the present day where a hierarchy of pitches focusing on a single, central tone is not used, and the notes of the chromatic scale...

. Liszt's work also foreshadowed the impressionism

Impressionism

Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s...

that would characterize the work of Debussy

Claude Debussy

Claude-Achille Debussy was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel, he was one of the most prominent figures working within the field of impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions...

and Ravel

Maurice Ravel

Joseph-Maurice Ravel was a French composer known especially for his melodies, orchestral and instrumental textures and effects...

, as shown in Les Jeux d'Eaux à la Villa d'Este (The Fountains of the Villa d'Este

Villa d'Este

The Villa d'Este is a villa situated at Tivoli, near Rome, Italy. Listed as a UNESCO world heritage site, it is a fine example of Renaissance architecture and the Italian Renaissance garden.-History:...

) from the third volume of Années de Pèlerinage. Another precursor of impressionism is Nuages gris
Nuages Gris
Nuages gris , S.199 or Trübe Wolken, is a work for piano solo composed by Franz Liszt on August 24, 1881. It is one of Liszt's most haunting and at the same time one of his most experimental works, representing, according to Allen Forte, "a high point in the experimental idiom with respect to...

, which won the admiration of both Debussy

Claude Debussy

and Stravinsky

Igor Stravinsky

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky ; 6 April 1971) was a Russian, later naturalized French, and then naturalized American composer, pianist, and conductor....

Economy of means

Compared to the creative abundance of earlier compositions, the music of Liszt's old age is unusually economic. Given barely enough notes to ensure their existence, his late pieces frequently lapse into monody

Monody

In poetry, the term monody has become specialized to refer to a poem in which one person laments another's death....

, then silence. Sometimes a piece is open-ended, simply vanishing. This practice of "abandoning" a work in mid-air had been done previously by Frédéric Chopin

Frédéric Chopin

Frédéric François Chopin was a Polish composer and virtuoso pianist. He is considered one of the great masters of Romantic music and has been called "the poet of the piano"....

and Robert Schumann

Robert Schumann

Robert Schumann, sometimes known as Robert Alexander Schumann, was a German composer, aesthete and influential music critic. He is regarded as one of the greatest and most representative composers of the Romantic era....

. Liszt's practice, however, is more radical. An example of this is in the Mephisto Polka
Mephisto Polka
The Mephisto Polka is a piece of program music written in folk-dance style for solo piano by Franz Liszt in 1882-3. The work's program is the same as that of the same composer's four Mephisto Waltzes, written respectively in 1859-60, 1880–81, 1882 and 1885 and based on the legend of Faust, not by...

, where the piece is simply deserted at the end, without explanation, dying out on a solitary F-sharp. Long passages are spun out on single notes and definite cadences are usually avoided, often leaving the overall tonality of pieces in doubt. A basic rhythmic unit, instead of becoming the foundation of an expansive Romantic melody, now becomes a stark end-product in itself. Throughout the late works, there is a freer, almost
improvisatory use of melody, yet one derived from the tightest structural cells Liszt could conceive.

Tonality

Liszt never lost interest in the question of tonality—a question which, for Liszt, was long standing. As early as 1832 he had attended a series of lectures given by Fétis. From these lectures, Liszt derived the idea of an onde omnitonique, much like a Schonbergian tone row

Tone row

In music, a tone row or note row , also series and set, refers to a non-repetitive ordering of a set of pitch-classes, typically of the twelve notes in musical set theory of the chromatic scale, though both larger and smaller sets are sometimes found.-History and usage:Tone rows are the basis of...

, that would become a logical replacement for traditional tonality. For him such a row would be part of the historical process from a "unitonic" (tonality) moved to a "pluritonic" (polytonality

Polytonality

The musical use of more than one key simultaneously is polytonality . Bitonality is the use of only two different keys at the same time...

) and ended in an "omnitonic" (atonality

Atonality

), where every note became a tonic

Tonic (music)

In music, the tonic is the first scale degree of the diatonic scale and the tonal center or final resolution tone. The triad formed on the tonic note, the tonic chord, is thus the most significant chord...

. In his marginalia to Ramann's biography of him, made after he had turned 70, Liszt called the "omnitonic" an Endziel or final goal of the historical process. He also composed a "Prélude omnitonique" to illustrate his theory. This piece was long considered lost but has recently been discovered.

Remaining lost, however, are the sketches for Liszt's treatise on modern harmony. Arthur Friedheim

Arthur Friedheim

Arthur Friedheim was a Russian-born pianist, conductor and composer who was one of Franz Liszt's foremost pupils.Friedheim was born in Saint Petersburg in 1859. He began serious study of music at age eight...

, a piano student of Liszt who became his personal secretary, wrote of seeing it among Liszt's papers at Weimar:

In his later years the Master had formed the habit of rising at five o'clock in the morning, and I paid him many a solitary visit at that hour, even playing to him occasionally. Jokingly, he would inquire whether I were still up, or already up. On the last of these matutinal visits I found him poring over books and old manuscripts. With his permission I joined him in this very interesting occupation. Catching sight of one manuscript which particularly drew my attention, I picked it up saying: "This will make you responsible for a lot of nonsense which is bound to be written someday." I expected a rebuke for my remark, but he answered very seriously: "That may be. I have not published it because the time for it is not yet ripe." The title of this little book was Sketches for a Harmony of the Future.

While the Sketches may have disappeared, Liszt left enough music from this period for listeners to surmise what that manuscript may have contained. Nuages gris
Nuages Gris
Nuages gris , S.199 or Trübe Wolken, is a work for piano solo composed by Franz Liszt on August 24, 1881. It is one of Liszt's most haunting and at the same time one of his most experimental works, representing, according to Allen Forte, "a high point in the experimental idiom with respect to...

is pointed out by several critics as a piece which could be heard as a gateway to modern music. One of its more intriguing features is its ending, which drifts off into keylesssness and progresses to that point in a manner foretelling impressionism in music.

Liszt was also one of the first composers to experiment with bitonality. One example occurs in the funeral march he wrote for László Teleky in his Historische ungarische Bildnisse (Historical Hungarian Portraits). This march is based on a four note ostinato based on the gypsy scale. The question of whether this ostinato is in G minor

G minor

G minor is a minor scale based on G, consisting of the pitches G, A, B, C, D, E, and F. For the harmonic minor scale, the F is raised to F. Its relative major is B-flat major, and its parallel major is G major....

or B minor

B minor

B minor is a minor scale based on B, consisting of the pitches B, C, D, E, F, G, and A. The harmonic minor raises the A to A. Its key signature has two sharps .Its relative major is D major, and its parallel major is B major....

, and the resulting tonal ambiguity, remains unresolved.

Chord structure

Liszt became a pioneer in building new chords. Until the end of the 19th century the triad

Triad (music)

In music and music theory, a triad is a three-note chord that can be stacked in thirds. Its members, when actually stacked in thirds, from lowest pitched tone to highest, are called:* the Root...

remained the prime architectural element in chordal structure. Few composers seemed to question whether chords built by other means were possible. One advance Liszt made was the use of minor and major chords struck together, a device he used in works such as the Czárdás obstinée. Another advance was in building chords in interval

Interval (music)

In music theory, an interval is a combination of two notes, or the ratio between their frequencies. Two-note combinations are also called dyads...

s other than thirds. This meant dispensing altogether with the triad in its former place of supremacy.

A prime example of Liszt's experimenting is the pile-up of thirds in the vocal work Ossa arida, which he wrote in 1879. Inspired by the vision of Ezekiel ("O ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord"), Liszt depicts musically the raising up of the flesh from the dust by gathering up all the notes of the diatonic scale

Diatonic scale

In music theory, a diatonic scale is a seven note, octave-repeating musical scale comprising five whole steps and two half steps for each octave, in which the two half steps are separated from each other by either two or three whole steps...

in a rising column, then sounding them simultaneously. There was no precedent to this approach and the piece retains a striking originality. A similar approach is the pile-up of fourths at the beginning of the Third Mephisto Waltz, written in 1883. At the climax of the piano piece Unstern! Liszt places two mutually exclusive chords against each other. Alan Walker quotes Peter Raabe as stating that the sounding of those two chords together is like a prisoner hammering on a wall, knowing full well that no one would hear him.

Harmony

Liszt's dispensing with the triad

Triad (music)

In music and music theory, a triad is a three-note chord that can be stacked in thirds. Its members, when actually stacked in thirds, from lowest pitched tone to highest, are called:* the Root...

altogether as a basis for the harmonic aspect of music was well ahead of his time. Arnold Schoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg was an Austrian composer, associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School...

started experimenting with building chords in fourths more than 30 years after Liszt had done so. People reportedly knowledgeable in music hailed Schoenberg's attempts at that time as "new." However, Liszt had done the same not only in then-unpublished works such as the Third Mephisto Waltz but also in published ones such as the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 17. Even in a popular work such as the Mephisto Waltz No. 1, the originality of its piling-up of fifths

Perfect fifth

In classical music from Western culture, a fifth is a musical interval encompassing five staff positions , and the perfect fifth is a fifth spanning seven semitones, or in meantone, four diatonic semitones and three chromatic semitones...

at its onset was remarkably forward for its time. The augmented triads of Unstern! (written in 1885) had already appeared in the Faust Symphony

Faust Symphony

A Faust Symphony in three character pictures , S.108, or simply the "Faust Symphony", was written by Hungarian composer Franz Liszt and was inspired by Johann von Goethe's drama, Faust...

; the bare parallel fifths of the Czárdás macabre, as already mentioned, had helped the devil tune up in the Mephisto Waltz No. 1.
However, Liszt makes more use in the late works of implied harmony, Chords hang unresolved, as at the close of Nuages Gris, and melodies are unaccompanied. Liszt's experimentation was accompanied by a bolder use of chromaticism

Chromaticism

Chromaticism is a compositional technique interspersing the primary diatonic pitches and chords with other pitches of the chromatic scale. Chromaticism is in contrast or addition to tonality or diatonicism...

in two forms—that which originated from gypsy music as well as that of Romantic style, with its sinuous counterpoint and enharmonic ambiguities.

Scales and modes

Liszt's interest in unusual scales and modes increased greatly in his last years. This may have been a side benefit of his growing involvement in the political and musical destiny of Hungary as well as in nationalist music in general. He was led to explore or investigate in greater detail the scales of Hungarian and east European music. This exploration of a specifically Hungarian mode of expression would profoundly influence Bartók. The whole-tone scale was another source of interest for Liszt.

A more complex picture

In one sense, it can be tempting to think of the late pieces as an extension of Liszt's earlier works, as they exhibit a similar adventurousness harmonically, an intense chromaticism

Chromaticism

and a tonal ambiguity. What is new is the sadness of heart which pervades many of the late works. As tempting as it can be to think of Liszt as the father of modern music on the basis of his late music, looking at his achievements in these works as ends in themselves would be erroneous. Liszt's technical achievements in his late music are one side of a more complex picture. Along with the increasing interest in Hungarian and other national schools of composition already mentioned, essential parts of this picture are tragedy in Liszt's personal life and developments in his friendship with Wagner.

In his later years Liszt's problems with health, both physical and mental, affected his ability to complete compositions. By the early 1880s, Liszt was often ravaged by a universal sadness, descending without warning and threatening to overwhelm everything he did. He told Lina Ramann

Lina Ramann

Lina Ramann was a German writer and teacher known for her books on the Hungarian composer and pianist Franz Liszt...

, "I carry with me a deep sadness of the heart which must now and then break out in sound." In addition, the deaths of his son Daniel in 1859 and daughter Blandine in 1862 brought a phase of deep personal anguish that impacted greatly on his creative life. As he grew older, he was also deeply affected by the deaths of certain political figures, artists and personal acquaintances. These events, among others, triggered elegiac outpourings ranging from the unusual to the bizarre. Liszt was already known for drinking considerable amounts of alcohol with no detectable effects on his speech or piano playing; however, beginning in 1882, friends became concerned with the quality of the alcohol he consumed, which now included absinthe

Absinthe

Absinthe is historically described as a distilled, highly alcoholic beverage. It is an anise-flavoured spirit derived from herbs, including the flowers and leaves of the herb Artemisia absinthium, commonly referred to as "grande wormwood", together with green anise and sweet fennel...

. It is very possible that alcohol both fed his depressive moods and limited his powers of concentration.

One point not normally discussed with Liszt but not unfamiliar to late-19th-century composers was his consciousness of working in the shadow of composers he considered giants. In Liszt's case, the shadows were those of Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven

and Wagner

Richard Wagner

Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, conductor, theatre director, philosopher, music theorist, poet, essayist and writer primarily known for his operas...

. He professed to find consolation and inspiration in their works. However, it is also possible their greatness may have had an effect on his own ability to compose. While he blamed his inability to complete compositions on his busy social calendar as late as the early 1870s, by the late 1870s he began to express fears of failing creativity on his part. However, most critically, Liszt was not entirely deterred by his insecurities or growing awareness of waning powers. He continued working until a year before his death, by which time cataract

Cataract

A cataract is a clouding that develops in the crystalline lens of the eye or in its envelope, varying in degree from slight to complete opacity and obstructing the passage of light...

s made composition virtually impossible.

Liszt wrestled daily with the demons of desolation, despair and death, bringing forth music that utterly failed to find its audience. We now know, in retrospect, that Liszt's contemporaries were offered a glimpse into a mind on the verge of catastrophe. They formed what Bence Szabolcsi calls "a conspiracy of silence" on the late pieces — one not lifted until modern times.

Liszt's works from this period fall into three categories:

Music of retrospection
Music of despair
Music of death

The first category contains pieces in which a troubled spirit seeks consolation in memories of the past. Liszt referred to this music as his "forgotten" pieces — sardonically referring to compositions forgotten before even played, with titles such as Valse oubliée, Polka oubliée and Romance oubliée.

The second category, music of despair, can appear much more important since the titles of the pieces in this category would seem to point to a troubled mind. These titles include:

Schafflos! Frage und Antwort
Unstern! Sinistre, Disastro
Nuages gris
Ossa arida
Csárdás macabre
Abschied

These pieces, as well as others in this category, can be best understood as fragments broken off from a greater whole, each offering a glimpse of a pathology of despair. Though they do not share any overtly musical connections, they seem to fit with one another like members of a large family who never settle on one place yet become acquainted through chance encounters at smaller gatherings.

The third category, music of death, contains pieces where Liszt raised grief to high art. Memorials, elegies, funerals and other aspects of the grieving process find their place in this music. Again, a sampling of titles in this grouping:

Funeral March for Emperor Maximilian
Seven Hungarian Historical Portraits

Széchenyi István
István Széchenyi
Széchenyi committed suicide by a shot to his head on April 8, 1860. All Hungary mourned his death. The Academy was in official mourning, along with the most prominent persons of the leading political and cultural associations...

(Lament)
Eötvös Jôzsef
József Eötvös
József baron Eötvös de Vásárosnamény was a Hungarian writer and statesman, the son of Ignacz baron Eötvös de Vásárosnamény and Anna von Lilien, who stemmed from an Erbsälzer family of Werl in Germany....
Vörösmarty Mihály
Mihály Vörösmarty
Mihály Vörösmarty was an important Hungarian poet and dramatist.He was born at Puszta-Nyék , of a noble Roman Catholic family. His father was a steward of the Nádasdys. Mihály was educated at Székesfehérvár by the Cistercians and at Pest by the Piarists...
Teleki László
László Teleki
Count László Teleki IV de Szék was a Hungarian writer and statesman. He is remembered as the author of the drama Kegyencz ....

(Funeral Music)
Deák Ferenc
Ferenc Deák
Ferenc Deák de Kehida , , was a Hungarian statesman and Minister of Justice. He was known as "The Wise Man of the Nation".-Early life and law career:...
Petõfi Sándor
Sándor Petofi
Sándor Petőfi , was a Hungarian poet and liberal revolutionary. He is considered as Hungary's national poet and he was one of the key figures of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848...

(In Memory of)
Mosonyi Mihály
Mihály Mosonyi
Mihály Mosonyi was a Hungarian composer. Born Michael Brand, he changed his name to Mosonyi in honor of the district of Moson , with Mihály being the Hungarian equivalent of "Michael"...

(Funeral Music)

Funeral Prelude and Funeral March
Elegy in Memory of Mme Mouchanoff
Und wir dachten der Toten (And We Thought of the Dead)

Liszt once referred to his works in this category as his "mortuary pieces", perhaps as a joke intended to deflect criticism. As Walker puts it: "These pieces reveal a soul in turmoil. Since that is also a part of the human condition, there can be something here for all of us".

Survey of works

Liszt wrote approximately 100 individual works for solo piano, as well as many others for various vocal ensembles and couple of orchestral works, from 1869 to the end of his life. While some of these piano works are actually collections of pieces, the late pieces are almost entirely smaller works. Liszt had completed virtually all of his large-scale works, including the oratorio

Oratorio

An oratorio is a large musical composition including an orchestra, a choir, and soloists. Like an opera, an oratorio includes the use of a choir, soloists, an ensemble, various distinguishable characters, and arias...

Christus
Christus (Liszt)
Christus is an oratorio by the Hungarian composer and pianist Franz Liszt. The oratorio takes the traditional plot of Jesus Christ's life from his birth to his passion and resurrection, using Bible texts, and is thus somewhat reminiscent of another famous religious work, Messiah by George Frideric...

; the only other large work he had planned, the oratorio St. Stanislaus, would remain unfinished at the time of his death, more than likely due to ill health rather than any mental incapacity

The late works of Franz Liszt can be grouped into six categories:

Music based on the works of others

While it is generally not recognized that Liszt continued writing transcriptions into his old age, this is actually by far the largest category of works he produced during this period. It numbers 35 items, two of which are collections (two sets of arrangements of songs by Robert

Robert Schumann

and Clara Schumann

Clara Schumann

Clara Schumann was a German musician and composer, considered one of the most distinguished pianists of the Romantic era...

. Moreover, many of these works continue to employ the virtuoso

Virtuoso

style of his earlier career. One example of this is the Réminiscences de Boccanegra, based on the Verdi

Giuseppe Verdi

Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi was an Italian Romantic composer, mainly of opera. He was one of the most influential composers of the 19th century...

opera

Opera

Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...

and written in 1882.

Liszt's musical allegiances are clear from the pieces he chose to set. He continued to transcribe music by his son-in-law Richard Wagner

Richard Wagner

Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, conductor, theatre director, philosopher, music theorist, poet, essayist and writer primarily known for his operas...

and seemed equally fond of Italian music. He considered Camille Saint-Saëns

Camille Saint-Saëns

Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns was a French Late-Romantic composer, organist, conductor, and pianist. He is known especially for The Carnival of the Animals, Danse macabre, Samson and Delilah, Piano Concerto No. 2, Cello Concerto No. 1, Havanaise, Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, and his Symphony...

a musical ally, setting his Danse macabre
Danse Macabre (Saint-Saëns)
Danse macabre, Op. 40, is a tone poem for orchestra, written in 1874 by French composer Camille Saint-Saëns. It started out in 1872 as an art song for voice and piano with a French text by the poet Henri Cazalis, which is based in an old French superstition...

in 1876; this work in turn may have influenced some of Liszt's later diabolic works, such as the Csárdás macabre. He also championed Russian music of different styles and schools. These composers included Dargomyzhsky

Alexander Dargomyzhsky

Alexander Sergeyevich Dargomyzhsky was a 19th century Russian composer. He bridged the gap in Russian opera composition between Mikhail Glinka and the later generation of The Five and Tchaikovsky....

, Tchaikovsky

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (Russian: Пётр Ильи́ч Чайко́вский ; often "Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky" in English. His names are also transliterated "Piotr" or "Petr"; "Ilitsch", "Il'ich" or "Illyich"; and "Tschaikowski", "Tschaikowsky", "Chajkovskij"...

, Anton Rubinstein

Anton Rubinstein

Anton Grigorevich Rubinstein was a Russian-Jewish pianist, composer and conductor. As a pianist he was regarded as a rival of Franz Liszt, and he ranks amongst the great keyboard virtuosos...

and Cui

César Cui

César Antonovich Cui was a Russian of French and Lithuanian descent. His profession was as an army officer and a teacher of fortifications; his avocational life has particular significance in the history of music, in that he was a composer and music critic; in this sideline he is known as a...

. Liszt admired the Russians especially for challenging Germanic hegemony

Hegemony

Hegemony is an indirect form of imperial dominance in which the hegemon rules sub-ordinate states by the implied means of power rather than direct military force. In Ancient Greece , hegemony denoted the politico–military dominance of a city-state over other city-states...

over matters of taste and style. One of the most striking of Liszt's late paraphrases is his setting of the Sarabande and Chaconne from Handel's opera Almira. This transcription was composed in 1879 for his English pupil Walter Bache

Walter Bache

Walter Bache was an English pianist and conductor noted for his championing the music of Franz Liszt and other music of the New German School in England. He studied privately with Liszt in Italy from 1863 to 1865, one of the few students allowed to do so, and continued to attend Liszt's master...

, and it is the only setting of a baroque

Baroque

The Baroque is a period and the style that used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, literature, dance, and music...

piece from Liszt's late period. name="baker103">Baker, 103.

Abstract compositions

This group of works is considerably smaller than the other groups, numbering only five works without any explicit programmatic information. Nearly every item dates from 1873 or earlier; the only exceptions are the final two of the Five Little Pieces, not published until 1963. Many of these pieces are also studies in advanced harmony. The Toccata, for instance, contrasts major versus minor and diatonic versus chromatic harmony

Diatonic and chromatic

Diatonic and chromatic are terms in music theory that are most often used to characterize scales, and are also applied to intervals, chords, notes, musical styles, and kinds of harmony...

.

One work in this category that should not be considered a late work is the Fantasy and Fugue on the Theme B-A-C-H
Fantasy and Fugue on the Theme B-A-C-H
Fantasie und Fuge über das Thema B-A-C-H Fantasie und Fuge über das Thema B-A-C-H (also in the first version known as Präludium und Fuge über das Motiv B-A-C-H, title in English: Fantasy and Fugue on the Theme B-A-C-H) Fantasie und Fuge über das Thema B-A-C-H (also in the first version known as...

. While it was composed in 1870 and published in 1871, it is written in his earlier style and is a type of work that he did not compose afterwards. It is based on Liszt's Prelude and Fugue on the Name B-A-C-H, written for organ in 1855-6 and revised in 1869-70. He arranged the revised organ work for piano and published it with a slightly different title.

Nationalistic and celebratory work

This became an extremely important part of Liszt's compositional output. It consists of 29 works of a festive or patriotic character, 15 of which are associated specifically with Hungary, including the set of seven Hungarian Historical Portraits completed in 1885. Liszt was often called upon to write music for state occasions, producing three marches and the Szózat und Ungarischer Hymnus, a setting of the Hungarian national anthem noted for its use of unusual scales together with the juxtaposition of chromatically related harmonies.

Liszt stopped writing in the Hungarian style after 1873 but resumed doing so in 1881; this was the year he visited his birthplace, Raiding. Liszt discovered late in life that writing Hungarian music allowed him to experiment more freely, as though asserting his national identity provided the strength and sense of purpose to break away from the limitations of Western European music. For the first time he turned his attention to the czárdás, a Hungarian folk dance. He may have also been influenced in this by Saint-Saëns, whose Danse Macabre shares a similar use of parallel fifths to his Czárdás macabre, composed in 1881-2. However, Liszt employs his musical material in this work with an extroverted vigor anticipating Béla Bartók

Béla Bartók

Béla Viktor János Bartók was a Hungarian composer and pianist. He is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century and is regarded, along with Liszt, as Hungary's greatest composer...

. The same could be said of the second, third and fourth Mephisto Waltzes, the second of which was dedicated to Saint-Saëns.

The three czárdás that Liszt wrote

Czárdás (Liszt)

The three czárdás that Franz Liszt wrote in 1881-2 and 1884 are solo piano pieces based on the Hungarian dance form of the same name. Liszt treats the dance form itself much less freely than he did much earlier with the verbunkos in the Hungarian Rhapsodies, and the material itself remains more...

—titled Czárdás, Czárdás obstinée and Czárdás macabre—are less freely treated than the Hungarian Rhapsodies

Hungarian Rhapsodies

Hungarian Rhapsody redirects here. For the 1979 Hungarian film Hungarian Rhapsody . For the 1928 German film Ungarische Rhapsodie.The Hungarian Rhapsodies, S.244, R106, is a set of 19 piano pieces based on Hungarian folk themes, composed by Franz Liszt during 1846-1853, and later in 1882 and 1885...

and remain more specifically Hungarian than gypsy in thematic material. Their spare lines, angular rhythms and advanced harmonies show these pieces to be direct ancestors of Bartók's work. Because of these attributes, the czárdás are considered by Liszt scholars among the more interesting of the composer's late output. The same, some critics argue, cannot be said as uniformly about his Hungarian Rhapsodies 16-19, composed after he had neglected the genre 30 years. Of these four late rhaposodies, only the last contains the variety, vivacity and sweep of the best of the earlier ones to make it effective in concert; the others fail to become satisfactory pieces due to their
fragmentary treatment. Interestingly, the final rhapsody is based on themes from Ábrányi's Csárdás nobles; the other three are based on original material

One potential pitfall in discussing these works is labeling them as atonal on the basis of hearing strange sonorities at the surface of the music. The Czárdás macabre, for instance, is solidly based on compositional procedures consistent with Liszt's earlier style. The music focuses on variant forms of the mediant

Mediant

In music, the mediant is the third scale degree of the diatonic scale, being the note halfway between the tonic and the dominant. Similarly, the submediant is halfway between the tonic and subdominant...

with concomitant contrast of sharp and flat key areas—in this case F major

F major

F major is a musical major scale based on F, consisting of the pitches F, G, A, B, C, D, and E. Its key signature has one flat . It is by far the oldest key signature with an accidental, predating the others by hundreds of years...

, F-sharp minor and G-flat major.

Sacred music

The sacred keyboard music is a small group of pieces, the most substantial of which were written mainly between 1877 and 1879. Several of these works are arranged from vocal music, including a piano solo arrangement of Via Crucis, one of Liszt's most daring and original compositions. Along with extended vocal works such as Via Crucis and Rosario, Liszt wrote 29 shorter choral works and a setting of Psalm 129.

Via Crucis is perhaps the closest Liszt came to creating a new kind of church music through combining a new harmonic language with traditional liturgy. While the overall atmosphere is restrained and devout in feeling, the harmony underpinning the music is experimental, including an extensive use of the whole-tone scale. While the composer uses familiar chorale and hymn tunes, the overall impression aurally is of an unsettled tonal language. Three of the 15 numbers (an introduction along with depictions of the 14 Stations of the Cross) employ sliding chromatic lines and harmonies; and when those harmonies do come to rest, they are often diminished or unique. Other Stations use successive chromatic chords and may abruptly end on a single tone.

Music of premonition, death and mourning

Liszt's works in this category make up a small but important collection of 13 individual works, including the two versions of La lugubre gondola. Some pieces from book III of Annees de Pelerinage could fit here, as could Via Crucis and the Historical Hungarian Portraits. Liszt was deeply affected by the deaths of friends and loved ones throughout his life; these losses, in turn, had a profound impact on the types of works Liszt would write. Like the sacred music, Liszt's works of premonition, death and mourning came from a deep inner impulse and he usually did not seek their publication. Many of these works are among his most unusual compositions, which stood in the way of their general accessibility.

Programmatic music

Works in this category carry special, non-generic titles. They include the Four Mephisto Waltzes

Mephisto Waltzes

The Mephisto Waltzes are four waltzes composed by Franz Liszt in 1859-62, 1880–81, 1883 and 1885. Nos. 1-2 were composed for orchestra, later arranged for piano, piano duet and two pianos, whereas 3 and 4 were written for piano only...

, the four Valses oubliées, and the orchestral and piano solo versions of the symphonic poem

Symphonic poem

A symphonic poem or tone poem is a piece of orchestral music in a single continuous section in which the content of a poem, a story or novel, a painting, a landscape or another source is illustrated or evoked. The term was first applied by Hungarian composer Franz Liszt to his 13 works in this vein...

From the Cradle to the Grave. These works were written primarily after 1876, many of them after the pivotal year of 1881, when Liszt fell down the stairs of the Hofgärtnerei in Weimar and his health took a precipitous slide. Contrary to the general reputation of Liszt's late works as gloomy and austere, the pieces in this category generally feature at least one of the attributes commonly associated with his earlier style—diabolical energy, brilliant effects of vertiginous dancing, tender nostalgia and ardent passion.

External links

Michael Sayers: Liszt's Resignazione as a mp3 file
AlexanderDjordjevic.com Listen to selected late works of Franz Liszt performed by pianist Alexander Djordjevic
Alexander Djordjevic
Alexander Djordjevic is an American classical concert pianist.-Biography:Born in Chicago, Alexander Djordjevic began his piano studies at age three, performing as a concerto soloist at ages twelve and fifteen...

, 2010 recipient of the Hungarian Liszt Society’s 35th Annual Franz Liszt International Grand Prix du Disque. http://www.lisztsociety.hu

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