4/19/20

View fullsize

Franz Liszt (1811-1886)

For today’s post, I wanted to make amends with anyone who may have been put off by yesterday’s work by selecting a collection of three pieces by the famous pianist and composer Franz Liszt. As perhaps the most famous Hungarian composer of the Romantic era, Liszt was known for his incredible talents and showmanship which he famously displayed in his tour of Europe. Many historians claimed that his fame was so extreme that audiences of his concerts had an almost fanatic-like quality, swooning over his gushingly romantic music and striking physical attractiveness. This characteristic is a key element of the 1975 film Lisztomania, which depicts the composer as the “first classical pop star,” while it’s possible that certain elements in the film may have been exaggerated. Regardless, his music (which includes a vast quantity of piano literature) is a testament to the Romantic style, with form and harmony being refined in brilliantly virtuosic fashion. One of his most recognizable melodies comes from the third (of three) Liebesträume, piano pieces whose title translates from German to “Dream of Love.”

Today’s selection comes from Liszt’s largest collection of works, Années de pèlerinage (which is French for “Years of Pilgrimage”), a set of three lengthy suites for solo piano. Combined, the suites include 26 individual pieces (if you include the three supplemental pieces in the second suite) with many being composed at different times. The collection as a whole is the culmination of a lifetime, with the first two suites showcasing the iconic Lisztian style and the third displaying a more reserved and harmonically experimental approach to composition which Franz Liszt would move into during his later years. The Tre sonetti del Petrarca (“Three sonnets of Petrarch”) were completed in 1846, and then revised and included in the second suite, Deuxième année: Italie (“Second Year: Italy”), or S. 161, which was completed in 1849. Each of the three pieces (numbered IV, V, and VI in the suite) are written as a musical response to three sonnets written by the famous Italian poet and scholar, Francesco Petrarca (sonnets 47, 104, and 123, respectively). I understand that the placement of these pieces may be slightly complex or confusing, but the vast quantity of music which Franz Liszt composed has made it quite difficult for music historians to catalog everything - especially when the difficulty of his pieces (at the time) meant that there were very few pianists aside from Liszt were attempting to learn his music.

In truth, there is not much about these pieces that absolutely needs to be said - it’s 20-25 minutes of pure Liszt, after all. Even so, there are a few elements of Liszt’s work which I can’t help but mention. Everything about the pieces is geared for it to come across as eloquent and, in some cases, flashy. As a brilliant performer, Liszt had the ability to use the range of the piano to achieve this, with arpeggios acting as the ‘bread and butter’ of quite a bit of the music. In moments of particular drama, notice how this becomes more extreme, with the left hand landing on powerful bass notes to either support the chord or to send the right hand rocketing up into the high register to perform a flying trapeze act at the top of the piano. Yet even when the use of range isn’t that extreme, that rarely stops Franz Liszt from showcasing his nuanced control of Romantic era harmony (in fact, sometimes the lack of showy hand-work is actually his way of luring the listener into falling for his harmonic tricks). Extended cadences and chromatic mediant modulations are just a few of the tools in his box which give the music a distinctively yearning and warm quality. My favorite example of his harmonic language can be heard throughout the second piece (No. V / Sonetto 104) in which Liszt uses the augmented tonic chord in two different ways: the first of which is when he spells the chord with a lowered 6th scale degree (and thus pivots from the tonic to the augmented chord and back), and the second being when he spells the chord with a raised 5th scale degree (in order to shift over to the relative minor). This effect is remarkably similar to Liebesträume No. 3 in context, with Liszt (in both pieces) staying on the same note in a melody while giving it a different harmonic contexts to create instability and force the melody to fall off of that note.

It doesn’t stop there, however, because even with countless harmonic ideas at his disposal, Franz Liszt will even (on occasion) throw it all out the window in favor of a completely chromatically driven flourish. This is most extreme when the right hand breaks away from the melody and texture completely to dance up and down the piano, before gracefully landing on a familiar harmony and moving on. While that is an extreme example of Liszt’s chromaticism, he incorporates brief moments of it throughout all of his music, and often in melodic lines that need a little more time getting from one note to another - and thus, making the music sound like how you imagine the emotion of love would, moving in a way that could be described as gracefully, smoothly, and perhaps even sensually. Franz Liszt was truly one of the ultimate Romantics, and with friends and colleagues like Frédéric Chopin, Robert Schumann, Mikhail Glinka, and Charles-Valentin Alkan, it is no wonder how he was able to learn and then so perfectly capture the Romantic style in music. Similarly to yesterday’s post, I must say that my own personal favorite piece from this collection of three has to be the second. Below I have linked a video with the score so that you can follow along, although I imagine that today’s piece will be much easier to play, sit back, and enjoy even without following the notes flying by on the page.