The man who reached the brink of atonality in his later scores also concocted the rambunctious Second Hungarian Rhapsody, without which cartoon music could not have existed. The late musicologist Richard Taruskin, in an essay titled “Liszt and Bad Taste,” noted that high-minded connoisseurs have been perennially embarrassed by Liszt’s “interpenetration of the artistic and the vulgar worlds”-his seemingly irreconcilable positions as a progressive thinker and as a brash entertainer. Despite his enduring fame, Liszt has never found a secure place in the pantheon of composers. This was a heady introduction to the lustre of Liszt, who remains at once one of the most outwardly recognizable figures in musical history-the flowing shoulder-length hair, the aquiline nose, the eerily long, flexible fingers-and one of the most enigmatic. My renditions of the Sonata tended to skip from the first page to the last. Finally, chords of A minor, F major, and B major shine from above-deus-ex-machina grace for a divided soul. At the very end, after a grandiose journey that telescopes a multi-movement form into a single unbroken span, we return to the descending scales, though they now assume a contour familiar from Eastern European and Middle Eastern music (“Hava Nagila,” “Misirlou”). The music that ensues-thrusting double-octave gestures, of a fencing-with-the-Devil variety-refuses to resolve the ambiguity, although it does at least pilot us toward the home key of the Sonata, of which there was initially no clue. It’s as if Liszt sketched out two possible beginnings and then included both of them. When I plowed through the Sonata for the first time, I couldn’t get over the strangeness of those juxtaposed scales. But the grave tempo suppresses any hint of folkish character instead, the dolor only deepens. If this were played sped up on a cimbalom, it might conjure an old-fashioned Budapest café. Barnes must have told me that it was the so-called Gypsy scale, a staple of Hungarian verbunkos music. What was this? In the margin, I wrote “Gypsy.” Mr. I remember squinting at the page and picking out the notes uncertainly. What was a staircase of broad, even planks-step, step, half step, step, step, step, half step-becomes an irregular, treacherous structure: down a half step, then a minor third, then two more half steps, then another minor third, and finally a half step and a step. Indeed, we descend once more, but along a markedly different course. The two G’s sound again, creating an expectation that the scale will recur in turn. Faust might be brooding in his laboratory Byron might be dreaming of death and darkness. “Abandon all hope” could be written above this Phrygian, Stygian staircase. (The Hindustani raga known as Bhairavi, which is associated with tranquil devotion, is similar in shape.) Liszt’s scale, though, has an unmistakably gloomy aspect, its downward trudge recalling the passage to the dungeon in Beethoven’s “Fidelio.” We are in an echt-Romantic realm-sombre, religiose, remote, forbidding. The second and seventh degrees are lowered a half step, meaning that the scale assumes the contour of the Phrygian mode, which medieval theorists considered mystical in character. You then play a slowly descending G-minor scale, doubled at the octave. Liszt indicated that these notes should sound like muffled thumps on the timpani. You first encounter two clipped G’s on the lower end of the piano, spread across two octaves. The intellectual challenge is another matter. Yet the Sonata begins with seven bars of technically unchallenging music, which anyone who reads notation can manage. Liszt was hailed in his lifetime as the demigod of the piano, the virtuoso idol who occasioned mass fainting spells, and in the hundred and thirty-seven years since his death no one has challenged his preëminence. By the middle of the second page, I was floundering, but I had already received a constructive shock. One day, he placed in front of me the score of Franz Liszt’s Sonata in B Minor-a deceptively thin document of thirty-five pages. The idea was to experience the music from within, however pitiful the results. My high-school piano teacher, Denning Barnes, liked to assign me pieces that I had no hope of being able to play.
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