Franz Liszt (1811-1886)

Après une Lecture du Dante - Fantasia quasi Sonata
from Années de Pèlerinage, Deuxième Année: Italie (No. 7)

The second book of Années de Pèlerinage is based on Liszt's impressions in Italy, in particular the literature, paintings, and sculpture of the Italian Renaissance. Although originally written between 1837 and 1839, he continued to work on these pieces eventually publishing them in final form in 1858. Of the seven works in the second set of the Pèlerinage trilogy, the last, and most extensive, work is a fantasy in the style of a sonata, popularly known as the Dante Sonata.

Dante's Divine Comedy, the greatest poem of the middle ages, was Liszt's inspiration for this piece, although the title is taken from the poem Après une Lecture de Dante (After Reading Dante) from Victor Hugo's 1837 volume of poetry Les Voix intérieures:

After Reading Dante

The poet, when he painted hell, was painting
   His life: a fleeing shade, ghosts at his back;
An unknown forest where his timid footsteps
   Had lost their way, strayed from the beaten track;
A somber journey clogged with strange encounters,
   A spiral -- its depth vast, its boundaries blurred-
Whose hideous circles went forever onward
   Through the dark where hell's creatures dimly stirred.
There were complaints perched upon every parapet:
   The steps vanished in vague obscurity,
Within those dismal regions of grim darkness
   White teeth seemed to be gnashing plaintively
Visions were there, reveries, and chimeras,
   Eyes turned by sorrow into bitter springs,
Love, a yoked couple, ever burning, wounded,
   Whirling along in wretched spiralings;
Revenge and famine, those rash sisters, squatting
   Together by a well-gnawed human head
In one dark corner, next to them, ambition
   Pale smiling misery; pride, ever fed
On its own flesh, vile lechery; foul avarice -
   All of the leaden cloaks that burden souls!
Further along, fear, cowardice, and treachery,
   With keys for sale, and drink in poisoned bowls;
Deeper still, at the bottom of the chasm,
   Was the tormented mask of suffering hate.
Yes, poet, that is life indeed -- we plod through
   Just such a foggy obstacle-clogged state!
But to complete the scene, on this cramped way was
   Virgil; his brow was calm, and his eyes shone,
He stood at your right hand, constantly visible,
   Serenely telling you: "Keep going on!"

The fantasy is essentially a powerful meditation on two contrasting themes of Dante's journey through the Inferno: the gruesome torment and suffering of the eternally damned, and the tragic love story of Francesca da Rimini. Liszt's treatment of the infernal chaos and dark circles of hell traveled by Dante with the spirit of Virgil as his guide, is a mass of taxing technical challenges and formidable passages of virtuoso piano-writing.

Après une Lecture du Dante opens with a descending sequence of tritones, the so-called devil's interval, followed by a first subject in D minor: a description of the descent of the poet into Inferno, followed by a furious build up, The chorale-like second subject marked Andante is first introduced forcefully in triple-forte at the end of the transition from the first subject, and builds into a beautiful singing melody relating the ill-fated love story of Paolo and Francesca da Rimini. Liszt creates textures that are orchestral in character and uses thematic transformation based on the first and the second subjects to develop the fantasy. These themes are transformed further in the Coda marked Allegro vivace and ends in Andante with a hint of the music of the distant Paradise in D major.

Vallée d'Obermann
from Années de Pèlerinage, Première Année: Suisse (No. 6)

Vallée d'Obermann is the sixth and the longest piece from the collection Années de Pèlerinage, Première Année: Suisse. This set of nine pieces is based on Liszt's impressions of the sights and sounds of his stay in Switzerland during 1835-36. In spite of its title (Valley of Obermann), this piece is not the musical representation of a Swiss landscape, but an emotional experience inspired by the French writer Etienne Pivert de Sénancour's Obermann (1804), a popular romantic novel of the time. Obermann is a novel without a plot: it is a collection of letters written by an imaginary solitary and melancholy character, most likely autobiographical, from a lonely valley of the Jura Alps. Liszt's treatment reflects the sentimental nature of this novel and the melancholy and solitude of its protagonist. Années de Pèlerinage was published in 1855, and a later reprint included a quotation from Sénancour, and also verses from Lord Byron's narrative poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto III 97, as the epigraph to the sixth piece. This quotation expresses the stark mood of Vallée d'Obermann in terms of the inner struggles of Byron's character:

"Could I embody and unbosom now
That which is most within me, --could I wreak
My thoughts upon expression, and thus throw
Soul, heart, mind, passions, feelings, strong or weak,
All that I would have sought, and all I seek,
Bear, know, feel and yet breathe --into one word,
And that one word were Lightning, I would speak;
But as it is, I live and die unheard,
With a most voiceless thought, sheathing it as a sword."

Vallée d'Obermann opens with a descending pattern that paints a desolate and melancholic picture, This main motif leads into a middle section in which it is transformed into a theme of great beauty, evoking emotions of ardor and yearning. The final section closes the piece in a triumphant manner, with fiery chord passages and double octaves, but with a hint of the initial sadness and solitude expressed with the return to the original descending pattern at the very end.

Sonata in B minor

Liszt completed the monumental Sonata for piano in B minor in February 1853. One of the most extraordinary of Liszt's works, it was composed in his Weimar years (1848-1861), during which time he completed many of his most impressive large-scale works: the two piano concertos, both the Faust and Dante symphonies; the Totentanz for piano and orchestra, and his symphonic poems. Additionally, he continued conducting at music festivals, including in his repertoire the works of Beethoven, Berlioz, Verdi and Wagner.

After the completion of the autograph of the sonata (dedicated to Robert Schumann, who had dedicated his Phantasie in C Major, Op. 17 to him), Liszt began to perform the work privately for friends and students, including Karl Klindworth, Ferdinand Laub, Joachim Raff, Dionys Pruckner, Eduard Remenyi, and the young Johannes Brahms. He had heard his piano sonata for the first time played by his student Karl Klindworth; but it was Hans von Bülow who first officially performed the Sonata in Berlin on January 22, 1857. Von Bülow had arrived in Weimar to study with Liszt in June 1851 and, according to Liszt scholar William Newman, had made a deep and lasting impression on the composer.

Following its publication and premiere, critics lambasted the new Sonata in B minor Liszt lamented, "up to now, all the best-known French pianists, except Saint-Saens, have shrunk from playing anything of mine except transcriptions, since my original compositions are considered ridiculous and intolerable." The newspaper 'Nationalzeitung' referred to it as..."eine Herausforderung zurn Zischen und Pochen" (an invitation to hissing and stomping). In spite of the conservative critics of the time, this work was a challenge to the established sonata form of the nineteenth century. With the benefit of hindsight, it now seems obvious that it represents a unique landmark in the history of piano music as the synthesis of the sonata-form movement with the multi-movement instrumental cycle, which Newman had dubbed the 'double-function' form.

Following the premise of a double-function form, the Sonata can be broken down roughly as follows: A 'First' movement, with a Slow introduction. Exposition, and Development: a 'Slow' movement, consisting of an Andante Sostenuto and a Quasi Adagio: and a 'Final' movement, with a Recapitulation, a Fugue (scherzando), and a Retransition which brings the sonata to an end in the way the form began. As in Liszt's other larger works, the Sonata's thematic material consists of a series of short motifs, or themes, transformed in character and mood throughout the entire piece. In all, this Sonata is comprised of seven themes: the first, is the first three measures of the slow introduction, the second, is the beginning of the exposition in the key tone of B minor; the third, immediately follows the second theme. The latter themes bear a certain resemblance to these first three. Interestingly enough, the work starts with a pause, followed by a quarter note, and a pause, and another quarter note. The reappearance of similar pauses plays a dramatic role throughout the sonata. Although the rhythms and motifs of these themes differ, the descending scale of the introduction (G - F - Eb D - C - Bb - Ab) without reference to a fixed key plays an important role in the remainder of the sonata. From a structural point of view, the first theme closes each significant major section of the piece. Liszt originally intended the sonata to end with a flourish and wrote a loud triple-forte conclusion, an idea that he ultimately abandoned in favor of the tranquil and introspective ending of the final published version.

Despite varying attempts to explain it, the form of the B minor Sonata still causes problems among musicologists. There is no universal agreement as to whether it should be considered a single movement in sonata form, or, a multi-movement work with a slow movement and a scherzo, or, whether the number of sections is four, or three. Indeed, the whole premise of the double-function structure itself, with the fugue identified as the scherzo, is suspect. These contradictory positions, particularly those surrounding the fugue, will undoubtedly long remain subject to debate.

Although Liszt educated many famous pianists, including Hans von Bülow, Carl Tausig, and Karl Klindworth, he did not produce a methodological work for piano-playing. In particular, there is no detailed information on his own interpretation of this sonata, for which, unlike most of his compositions, he had no programme, or explanation for his source of inspiration. Even specific information on the sonata in terms of the tempi is incomplete. Undoubtedly Liszt's principal concern lay in an artistic communication of mood, emotion, texture and musical effect, not virtuosity alone.

Throughout recording history the B minor Sonata has been interpreted by generations of pianists whose intense and on-going interest in the work serves as a testimony to its timeless nature, and a collective tribute to the genius of Franz Liszt.

Zeynep Ucbasaran

Portrait of Franz Liszt (1847), by Miklós Baralbás (1810-1898), Hungarian National Museum, Budapest.

Cover design based on "The Messenger of Autumn" (1922), by Paul Klee (1879-1940), Yale University Art Gallery

Après une Lecture de Dante / After Reading Dante (1837) by Victor Hugo (1802-1885), English translation by E. H. Blackmore & A.M. Blackmore.