Sonata in B minor (Liszt)

History

Liszt noted on the sonata's manuscript that it was completed on February 2, 1853, but he had composed an earlier version by 1849. At this point in his life, Liszt's career as a traveling virtuoso had almost entirely subsided, as he had been influenced towards leading the life of a composer rather than a performer by Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein almost five years earlier. Liszt's life was established in Weimar and he was living a comfortable lifestyle, composing, and occasionally performing, entirely by choice rather than necessity.

The sonata was dedicated to Robert Schumann, in return for Schumann's dedication of his Fantasie in C major, Op. 17 (published 1839) to Liszt. A copy of the sonata arrived at Schumann's house in May 1854, after he had entered Endenich sanatorium. His wife Clara Schumann did not perform the sonata; according to scholar Alan Walker she found it "merely a blind noise".

Reception

The sonata was published by Breitkopf & Härtel in 1854 and first performed on January 27, 1857 in Berlin by Hans von Bülow. It was attacked by Eduard Hanslick who said "anyone who has heard it and finds it beautiful is beyond help". Johannes Brahms reputedly fell asleep when Liszt performed the work in 1853, and it was also criticized by the pianist and composer Anton Rubinstein. However, the sonata drew enthusiasm from Richard Wagner following a private performance of the piece by Karl Klindworth on April 5, 1855. Otto Gumprecht of the German newspaper Nationalzeitung referred to it as "an invitation to hissing and stomping". It took a long time for the Sonata to become commonplace in concert repertoire both because of its technical difficulty and negative initial reception due to its status as “new” music. However by the early stages of the twentieth century, the piece had become established as a pinnacle of Liszt’s repertoire and has been a popularly performed and extensively analyzed piece ever since.

Music

No other work of Liszt has attracted anything like the same amount of scholarly attention as the B minor Sonata. The number of divergent theories it has provoked from those of its admirers who feel constrained to search for hidden meanings are many.

It is widely believed that Liszt's piece still fits the mold of a traditional four-movement sonata within the mold of one long sonata form.

Walker claims the quiet ending of the sonata was an afterthought; the original manuscript contains a crossed-out ending section which would have ended the work in a loud flourish instead.

Analysis

The sonata unfolds in approximately 30 minutes of unbroken music. While its four distinct movements are rolled into one, the entire work is encompassed within the traditional Classical sonata scheme — exposition, development, and recapitulation. Liszt has effectively composed a sonata within a sonata, which is part of the work's uniqueness. Liszt was very economical with his thematic material, indeed, the very first page contains the three motivic ideas that provide the content, transformed throughout, for nearly all that follows.

The sonata has four movements although there is no gap between them. Superimposed upon the four movements is a large sonata form structure, although the precise beginnings and endings of the traditional development and recapitulation sections has long been a topic of debate.

The first theme is a descending scale marked sotto voce; full of ominous undertow, it reappears at crucial points in the work's structure. This leads immediately to a jagged, forceful theme in octaves. This is quickly followed by a hammering marcato idea in the left hand. A dialogue ensues, with mounting energy, until reaching the noble grandiose second subject in D major. Liszt transforms the left-hand theme into a lyrical melody of exquisite loveliness. The slow movement, an Andante sostenuto of haunting beauty, is the centerpiece of the sonata. This fully fledged "compound ternary" form features in quick succession a number of themes heard earlier in the sonata in a tour de force of thematic economy.The final recapitulatory section is launched by a driving fugato of contrapuntal skill which leads to the compressed return of the opening material. Calling upon every intellectual resource and fully exploiting the pianist's technical arsenal, it is at this point where a performer's concentration might flag. But this final section has only just begun, and a pianist needs to have reserved fuel in his tank if he is to turn in a successful performance of the sonata. Each of the sections are examples of Classical forms, which means that this piece is one of the first instances of Double-function form, a musical piece which has two classical forms happening at the same time; one containing others. Already in 1851 Liszt experimented with a non-programmatic "four-movements-in-one" form in an extended work for piano solo called Grosses Concert-Solo. This piece, which in 1865 was published as a two-piano version under the title Concerto pathétique, shows a thematic relationship to both the Sonata and the later Faust Symphony.

Arrangements

Camille Saint-Saëns, a close friend of Liszt, made a two-piano arrangement of the Sonata in 1914, but it was never published in his lifetime because of rights issues. It was first published in 2004 by Édition Durand in Paris, edited by Sabrina Teller Ratner. According to a letter from Saint-Saëns to Jacques Durand, dated 23 August 1914, the two-piano arrangement was something that Liszt had announced but never realized.

There is an extremely difficult version of this Sonata in B minor for violin which was transcribed by Noam Sivan and premiered by violinist Giora Schmidt in September 2011. It has been published by Carl Fischer.

Leó Weiner made an orchestral arrangement of the Sonata in 1955. The arrangement has not been published and exists only in manuscript form. It was recorded in 2006 by the orchestra of Hochschule für Musik Franz Liszt, Weimar with Nicolás Pasquet conducting.

Heinz Roemheld orchestrated the Sonata which is heard on some 1930s movies, including the The Black Cat (1934), starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, The Raven (1935), as well as the Flash Gordon serials (1936) (Chapters 6-13), Werewolf of London (1936), and Mars Attacks the World (1938).

An orchestrated version of the lyrical parts of the Sonata appears in the 1960 Hollywood film of Liszt's life called Song Without End (starting 1:07).

There is an orchestrated excerpt version of the Sonata in the 1952 film Hans Christian Andersen starring Danny Kaye where the ballet scene for "The Little Mermaid" is danced near the end of the film (starting around 1:23 min).

Frederick Ashton used the Sonata for his 1963 ballet Marguerite and Armand, created for Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev, based on "The Lady of the Camellias" by Alexandre Dumas, fils. The original performances used an orchestral transcription of the Sonata by Humphrey Searle.

An organ transcription of the Sonata was made in 1984 by Bernhard Haas.

There is also a transcription of the Sonata for solo cello made by cellist Johann Sebastian Paetsch in 2013. This has been published by the Hofmeister Musikverlag in Leipzig.