Liszt - Sonata in b minor (1854)

It has taken me years to write a blog post on this piece. It’s been a favorite of mine since high school, but I’m afraid it’s one of those works where it is too easy to “overtalk” it, and use too many comparisons and poetic ideas instead of letting the music speak for itself. So, I will try and be as “unpoetic” as I can. Despite how Liszt himself was very poetic. He believed music can be used to express non-musical ideas, and was on the side of the badly named “War of the Romantics” who believed that old forms of music writing were limited. With new expressive abilities means new forms should be used. One method that Liszt stuck to almost all of his life was cyclical form, in which only a small handful of themes [or even one theme] is used and reused throughout the work, changing and ultimately leading to some kind of transformation that becomes a poetic expression of the sublime. With all this talk of poetry and of rejecting old forms, it’s shocking that Liszt’s greatest masterpiece is a piano sonata. What the musicologists love is how he sticks to the old four movement structure, while also writing it as one single sonata movement. As in, it is a half an hour sonata movement that can also be broken into four movements [where the first of these four is *also* following sonata movement]. This complex writing is called “double function form”. What is more interesting and captivating is the way Liszt uses the main melodies, and how even though there is no story behind this music, there is no real narrative or idea that is being portrayed, the expressive quality makes it so easy to think of something. People like to argue this is somehow a depiction of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Or that it’s yet another look at Goethe’s Faust [how composers LOVED Faust]. Or that it is somehow autobiographical. But I think the best interpretation is no interpretation. The sonata doesn’t have to be about anything. It opens with a hushed gasp, a descending scale which is melody 1, before erupting into a declaration, melody 2. Then melody 3 is based on one repeated note, and the first part works with these three motifs until the last main melody (4) rings out as one noble choral like passage. And maybe part of the reason why this work feels so expressive is all of the opera like reactives, where the music is full of space as one single melodic line is used as connective tissue between different dramatic episodes. Any contrasting melody sounds different because of the writing and harmony, but the more often you listen to this work [please listen to this more than once] the more you realize there are no more new melodies, everything is a reworking of the four melodies that opened the piece. The “second movement” has a very powerful build up to one of the most beautiful moments in piano music history [the climax begins around the 15 minute mark]. The “third movement” opens as a slight fugato reworking of the introduction, this is also the recapitulation section I think. And the exact dividing moment between the “scherzo” movement and the “fourth movement” is vague, but at best we can say that after a very energetic and joyous reworking of the first theme leading us into a flourish of gold, we reach the coda. The last three minutes of the sonata is one of the “must hear” moments in classical music history. The conflict is over, and what we have is a meditation on everything that has just happened. In his early manuscripts, Liszt ended the work in a grandiose banging of chords, but following the spark of genius, he realized the better and more effective ending was the quiet one, where the music drifts off into some other plane of existence. It’s a shame to read the history of this work and see that it was hated by the conservatives of the time [Brahms fell asleep! I love him but have yet to hear anything by Brahms that is as moving as the last three minutes of this sonata]. It’s hard to put into words what this sonata feels like to me, and how it moved me at important moments in my life. But overall, I feel like this sonata is a cumulation of “years of pilgrimage”, of growing up and maturity, and of finding a greater acceptance of the beauty of life, even amongst the suffering and confusion. Look at me, getting poetic and sentimental after I promised I wouldn’t. This is my favorite piano sonata, so it is difficult to leave “me” out of the description. Listen for yourselves, and honestly? Listen to it again on another date. And then again later. Every new listen brings out something new, either a new use of melody, or a unique harmony. And with better understanding, the emotional journey becomes more and more significant.

Caspar David Friedrich - Moonrise over the Sea (1822)