B minor sonata revisited: Deciphering Liszt, The

Musical Times, Spring 2003 by Brown, David

Yet the fundamental importance of Liszt's and Karolina's relationship to this Sonata may drive far deeper, for it seems that these four iconic representations also became the activists which, through their `real-life' engagements, slyly determined how a whole stretch of the music might evolve, in the process unwittingly causing part of the understandable bewilderment, even musical distress, experienced by some during the Sonata's early years. Liszt had dedicated the piece to Schumann. We do not know what that composer thought of it when it was published in May 1854, for he was now confined to the asylum in which he would die two years later. But on receiving a copy of the printed work, Schumann's wife, Clara, perhaps the greatest woman musician of the nineteenth century and one whose innate intelligence and cultivated taste would have been both disposed and able to encompass a major piece that expanded music's boundaries, wrote to a friend that the Sonata was `merely a blind noise - no healthy ideas any more, everything confused, [ ...] and yet I must thank him for it [the dedication]. It really is too awful.'7 Certainly her husband's more neoclassical examples - even his great C major Fantasia, op.178 - had done little or nothing to prepare her for this. Though Liszt played his Sonata privately to visitors (including the young Brahms, whose achievement of dozing off during the occasion has become legendary), the first public performance, given in Berlin by Liszt's pupil, Hans von Bulow, was delayed a further three years, and the work fared badly with some critics, one (Otto Gumprecht) describing it as `an invitation to hissing and stamping',9 another (Gustav Engel) observing that `in order to take pleasure in works of this type, one must completely renounce everything required by nature and logic; it is hardly possible to be farther removed from natural principles than in this work.10 Only in the later nineteenth century did the Sonata begin to establish for itself a place in the repertoire.

There is one section, the exposition from the second subject onwards (bars 105-203), which above all could be interpreted as the narrative of a private passage between Liszt and Karolina. The mixing of materials extracted from the principals' four symbols that was required for such a programme had consequences, especially for the thematic ordering and treatment, that confounded traditional structural expectations. Certainly there seems no reason to think that considerations other than musical ones had created the train of events ahead of this point (i.e., up to the entry of the traditional second subject); on the other hand, the instant and free incorporation of first subject materials into what follows has nothing to do with traditional second subject practice. Liszt's procedure for achieving organic evolution in the Sonata was not through motivic operations but thematic transformations, as is clearly exemplified in the presentation of Liszt's own theme (ex.6) immediately after Karolina's, now informed with a touching gentleness in savage contrast to its imperious self-advertisement in the Sonata's first pages (this unconventional and sogentle reintroduction of the first subject at this juncture, and the extreme expressive dislocation it occasions, was no doubt but one of the `natural principles' whose violation so offended Gustav Engel - and perhaps also caused discomfort to Clara Schumann). An even more tender, lightly harmonised and drastically augmented transformation follows (dolce con grazia) - and then a momentary hesitation (molto ritenuto) before snatches of Liszt's love theme appear furtively (ex.7) - little amorous nudges teasing a response from Karolina which she readily grants, the music filling out texturally and expressively, and culminating in the first, openhearted declaration of her love theme, cantando espressivo.