▒ Franz Liszt | The Final Years ▪ late piano compositions ▪ Reinbert de Leeuw (1982)

[0:00] A1. Vier Kleine Klavierstücke (1865-1876)
[9:21] A2. Sospiri (1879)
[12:51] A3. Bagatelle Sans Tonalité (1885)
[16:00] A4. Wiegenlied (1881)
[19:59] A5. Nuages Gris (1881)
[23:44] A6. Abschied (1885)
[27:12] B1. La Lugubre Gondola I (1882)
[33:40] B2. La Lugubre Gondola II (1882)
[43:51] B3. Richard Wagner - Venezia (1883)
[43:37] B4. Unstern (1880-1886)
[57:08] Notes

From the notes, by Reinbert de Leeuw:

When Franz Liszt died during the Bayreuth Festival in 1886, the local paper reported: "Wagner's father-in-law dies." He was mourned by his many pupils and remained a legend as a pianist, but as a composer he was quite obscured by the shadow of Richard Wagner.

During his long career Liszt had used his considerable power and influence on behalf of many colleagues, Wagner in particular, but when it came to promoting his own compositions he was the picture of reticence. "My father's unspeakable modesty in respect of his works touches Richard deeply while, for his part, he declares with good cheer that he has stolen' so much from the symphonic poems...," Cosima notes in her diary. Apart from modesty, the popularity of some of his piano pieces ("Liebesträume" and the Hungarian Rhapsodies) was an obstacle to recognition of the extraordinarily original, often revolutionary character of his most important works, upon which Wagner was not the only one to draw freely.

As early as 1860 a number of very prominent musicians, Brahms among them, declared in a stinging manifesto that the work of Liszt and Wagner was "contrary to the spirit of music." From that moment, the conflict between "traditional" and "progressive" composers has never been absent from musical history.

Although during his whole career as a composer Liszt was strongly inclined to extend constantly the boundaries of music, the compositions of his last years in particular overstep repeatedly the bounds set by tonality. Around 1880 Liszt wrote a number of pieces, mostly for the piano, which bring into being a musical language that was to take shape decades later in the works of Debussy. Schoenberg, and Bartók.

With a prophetic glance, the music foresees a stage of development where laws of tonality and musical structure related to them have no further validity. "To hurl a lance into the endless realm of the future," to cite his own words, was the ambition which drove him on in the compositions of his final years.

Insofar as the musical world was able to hear any of this music (Liszt hardly ever played the pieces, and most were not published until long after his death), it was shocked. "The picture that Liszt's contemporaries had of him during his final years was that of an eccentric, idling away at the keyboard, producing pieces which were an embarrassment to his friends and a source of considerable amusement to his enemies," writes Alan Walker in his article "Liszt and the Twentieth Century." Even when, on a rare occasion, Liszt played a few of these pieces at the home of the Wagner family, they were received in painful silence, and although Wagner himself had made the negation of the tonic almost the norm in "Tristan und Isolde," he condemned to Cosima the rigorous consequences which Liszt drew from this as "keimenden Wahnsinn" (the seeds of madness).

In several of the late piano pieces, Liszt makes no attempt whatsoever to moderate the startling nature of his musical ideas through a nominal show of melodiousness (as he does in some earlier compositions, where sometimes the most original harmonic concepts are almost buried beneath a vast burden of fioriture and purely virtuoso passage-work). The writing becomes sparse and the thread of the music not infrequently loses itself in many bars of monody: melodies stagnate, dissonances pile up without resolution, the tonality runs adrift and in some pieces disappears entirely.

Although the startling, revolutionary sonorities in some of these pieces are historically of the utmost importance and stamp Liszt as the salient forerunner of twentieth-century music, the purely musical worth of this music cannot be measured simply by comparison with it. The penetrating expression in many of his late works and the concentrated manner in which it takes shape in the music give a picture of a composer who, at the end of his life, has had done with externals and clichés, and for whom only the essence of things still has any meaning.