B minor sonata revisited: Deciphering Liszt, The

Musical Times, Spring 2003 by Brown, David

Is the Hungarian master's great piano work more than its title suggests? DAVIDBROWN offers a new interpretation.

He [Liszt] was content simply to describe his masterpiece by the generic term 'sonata' - an inscrutable title that seems to close the door on further discussion.1

LISZT'S PIANO SONATA has long been the subject of speculation that it is rather more than its bald title would have us believe. A musical portrait of the Faust legend, a conflict between the divine and the diabolical based on the Bible and Milton's Paradise lost, an allegory of the Garden of Eden dealing with the Fall of Man, with themes representing God, Lucifer, the Serpent, Adam and Eve: these are but three of the `hidden meanings' cited by Alan Walker in his three-volume study of Liszt as having been foisted upon this great work. All are, of course, merely speculations with not one iota of hard evidence to support them; nor did Liszt himself ever hint that his Sonata was more than the monolithic piece of dazzling inventiveness, structural boldness, and vast expressive range that is now recognised as one of the great symphonic masterpieces of the nineteenth century.

Yet does Liszt's 'generic' title finally close the matter? Is it not possible that there could be a secret programme, not one about which the composer challenges the listener to speculate (as Elgar does with Enigma), but one that was to be confided only to any involved in it, or else to remain a confidence known only to its creator? In a close relationship, even one of love, might not a composer find his joy simply in knowing he had summoned up his fullest powers to fashion the best tribute to his beloved of which he was capable? And if we, on our part, have no evidence except that conjured up by wishful thinking, or by a wilful determination to find hidden content, do not our hypotheses have no more value than the programmes quoted above? The defence I can claim for what follows is that at least it is founded on internal evidence that seemed a sufficient basis to justify yet another theory. It was only indirectly and by chance that I came to notice the tiny key that seemed to unlock at least something of this Sonata's suggested secret. What follows here is the result of two observations, without the first of which and its immediate consequences, the second - the prompting of this article - would not have been made. Some account of this earlier observation is therefore a necessary preliminary to the main investigation.

AROUND 1980, while casually revisiting that strange, virtually keyless music that makes up the Lento assai introduction to the first movement of Liszt's Faust symphony, I happened to note its total exclusion of the commonest melodic interval in western music, the major second. Curiosity was aroused: some factor must be controlling pitch organisation, further scrutiny revealing that only six intervals (the semitone, major and minor thirds, and their inversions) were employed. The outcome was an article2 which set out a case that every note in this introduction could be accounted for as a unit within one of five musical ciphers extracted from Liszt's name(s),3 these ciphers being always linked, even overlapping, to produce melodic strands. Then, at a late stage in this research, another chance return, this time to the Piano Sonata composed the previous year (1853), occasioned the noting of another detail: that the second of the two descending scales with which the Sonata opens had not only been based on one of the ciphers to be used the following year in the Faust symphony, but had also exemplified the same process of linkage and overlapping to generate melodic growth. At the end of the earlier article I merely commented on this cipher-scale in the Sonata, exemplifying it briefly. The present article furthers this investigation.

The cipher which Liszt had used in the Sonata (ex.la) was that drawn from his Hungarian-style 'convenience' Christian name, Ferenc, followed by Liszt (see note 3), where the 'is' in the surname, now appended to the final 'c' of Ferenc, raised that pitch to CO. The full scale Liszt synthesised from the prime and retrograde inverted forms of ex.la is set out in bars 5-6 of ex.2, with overlaps/linkage indicated.4 This may hardly seem noteworthy, but what immediately follows certainly is. The Ferenc Liszt cipher has a second viable form (see ex.lb), and it seems clear that both forms were recruited to provide the nuclei that propagated the first six pitches of the Sonata's Allegro energico first subject (see ex.2, bars 9-10),5 the strongest of suggestions, surely that Liszt devised this abrupt and forceful theme as a highly plausible projection of himself. Nor, it seems, is this the Sonata's only coded identity; indeed, what evolves subsequently suggests that the work is autobiographical - in fact, a celebration of its composer's relationship with Carolyne [born Karolina] von Sayn-Wittgenstein, a relationship that lasted until Liszt's death.

THE thirty-five-year-old Liszt had encountered this Polish-born woman in January 1847 in Kiev, where she had attended one of his recitals. Eight years younger than he, and the heiress to vast estates in the Ukraine, Karolina was married with a daughter, though already separated from her husband. A woman with deep interests in literature and philosophy and, like Liszt, a devout Roman Catholic, she and Liszt were immediately drawn to each other, and in the autumn of 1848 she finally took up residence with him in Weimar. For some thirteen years she made strenuous efforts to have her marriage annulled, a campaign that came to a heartrending end in 1861 when, having obtained the Pope's permission to remarry, but having delayed the ceremony because she wanted it to take place on Liszt's fiftieth birthday, she received notice of withdrawal of consent only twelve hours before the wedding. Nevertheless, even when they had ceased to cohabit, a bond remained between them which survived until Liszt's death. Our greatest debt to Karolina was her early pressure upon Liszt to abandon the endless round of recital giving to which he had devoted much of the previous eight to nine years, and to concentrate instead on composition, a pressure to which Liszt willingly yielded. That she was rewarded with the dedications of all twelve of the symphonic poems he composed between 1848 and 1857 is perhaps a reflection of the significant role she had come to play, not only in his personal, but also in his professional world. Indeed, these years were to be some of the most significant in his creative life.