Franz Liszt: Sonata in B minor

Today let us turn our attention to one of the most important compositions of the nineteenth century, a fantastic piano piece: Liszt’s Sonata in B minor. I don’t usually talk about historical background, but this time I’ll make an exception, because with this work the background carries musical weight. The Sonata in B minor was finished in 1853, after preparations that took about a year, perhaps a little more. Since it is a pivotal work in Liszt’s output, it is worth looking at the compositions that came before it. The Sonata in B minor was preceded by Les Préludes,1 the portrait, in a symphonic poem, of an idealised hero’s journey through life. Before that came two other symphonic poems, Prometheus and Mazeppa, each built around a distinct motif of heroism. Both heroes are punished, or fail, in the course of the story.

What links these works is a shared ideology that—to put it simply—is the composer’s self-image, his relationship with himself and with the world. The Sonata in B minor marks a turning point in Liszt’s output. Our composer was known first of all as a globetrotting virtuoso, adored the world over as a pianist and performer. In the piano works of this period, alongside the shaping of musical ideas, we can make out a new device: virtuosity. The question of virtuosity has become rather a vexed one today. As the mastery of the impossible, virtuosity has always been part of human nature. In art you can watch this impulse at work in almost every era—from the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World to the Gothic cathedrals, from ancient sculpture to Michelangelo’s frescoes, from Tallis’s forty-part motet to Bach’s The Art of Fugue.

Virtuosity turns into a problem when it stops being a means and becomes an end in itself: the pianist plays something fiendishly difficult simply to astonish the audience—and it hardly matters what musical value the thing he is playing actually has. This, in essence, is the point in music history where the notion of the ‘commercial’ is born, where a work’s worth shows up not chiefly in its aesthetic merit but in its market price. We do not, of course, usually count Liszt’s piano works from this period as commercial—especially given how briskly openly commercial genres and compositions have been multiplying ever since. ¹ Liszt wrote the Sonata in B minor in 1852–53. Les Préludes: 1854; Prometheus: 1850 (premiere: 1855); Mazeppa: 1851.

Liszt was a deeply religious man, and it is as though, in writing the Sonata in B minor, he set himself, his life so far and his musical achievements against his calling and his faith. The Sonata in B minor is an extraordinarily focused, lucid work, and in some ways ascetic compared with his earlier music. It has a good deal in common with pieces of the Art of Fugue kind. It is as though its purpose were not performance at all, but rather to set down a kind of artistic creed, a summing-up for eternity. We know for certain, of course, that Liszt meant the Sonata in B minor to be performed—but the work’s intensity and novelty reached far beyond the nineteenth century. No wonder it was not popular in its own day (Brahms is said to have nodded off when Liszt played it at a house concert); only in the twentieth century did it become a cult favourite among pianists.

The work, as its title says, is a sonata. We think of the sonata as both a genre and a form. Taken as a form, we can say we are dealing with a tonal plan: we set out from a certain point, move into another key, and then, after some wandering, return to the home key. On the one hand this is simple; on the other it is quite intricate, and the musical world does not entirely agree on what is the essence of this form and what is merely its surface.2 From the genre side, we call the cyclical pieces of chamber music and the solo repertoire sonatas. What the symphony is to an orchestra, the sonata is to a pianist. Typically it runs to four movements, which are best regarded not as a single large form3 but as a cycle of several smaller ones (that is, there is usually no musical-dramatic link between the movements). In this work Liszt set out to do things of pioneering importance.

Even the form of his piano concertos is somewhat ambiguous: they fall into clearly separable sections which, on the one hand, I can treat—if I choose—as traditional movements, but which, on the other, I can also read as parts of one grand sonata form. In the Sonata in B minor, the cyclical principle finally merges into the larger form. In terms of tonality and of structure alike, the work is one large sonata form. Listen to how the piece begins! ² Essence and phenomenon: philosophical concepts in which, from an artistic point of view, the phenomenon is the perceptible outer form, the manner of presentation and the means of communication, while the essence is the underlying thought, idea and inner content. ³ Large form: the term refers to a way of composing in which there is a dramaturgical link between the movements of a work otherwise reckoned cyclical (e.g. a symphony).

It can already be seen in certain symphonies by Beethoven, but in the Romantic period it became common for the fourth movement to provide a kind of resolution to the musical events of the movements before it.