B minor sonata revisited: Deciphering Liszt, The

Musical Times, Spring 2003 by Brown, David

The treatment of the double-scale idea that had launched the piece and recurred intermittently during its half-hour course also merits attention, especially for the mystery of the maverick tetrachord. Sometimes, almost invariably with its two preceding detached beats, the idea provides merely a rhythmic matrix for a couple of descending scales that slot into the key of the moment.15 However, on other occasions it picks up the two motifs from which it seems the Sonata's opening scales were respectively compounded - for the repeated appearance of the descending tetrachord alongside the Ferenc Liszt motif gives the former also its own and, presumably, significant identity. The question immediately arises, of course, whether it is also cipher-generated, but no solution offers itself - at least, not at this point.

The deployment of the two motifs to generate the scales is varied (ex.11). At the opening it is very systematic, each scale of the first pair (exx. la and b) being founded upon only one of the motifs, those in the following pair (exx. 11116 and d) employing both motifs, the second scale reversing those motifs' order. Though transposed, the fifth scale (ex. lIe), the first of the pair that prepares for the recapitulation, matches exactly the Sonata's initial scale, but the second (ex. 11 f) fractures the system - and not only because it banishes the first statement of the Ferenc Liszt motif: it does not even reproduce exactly the scalic motif, for the central two pitches have now been raised a semitone. But in this apparent aberration may lie the clue to the mystery of the scalic tetrachord itself, for this solitary intruder could have been cipher generated from Ferenc (ex.12). This claim is, of course, weakened by the need to incorporate one element from the French or Italian system of note designation - though since there is no set of absolutes controlling cipher manufacture, Liszt may have felt justified in this 'convenience' generation (see also note 3). However, his use of this elsewhere is only in retrograde inversion, and though he had been happy to employ such a form (in this instance the retrograde) just once (to shape the opening of his own theme (see ex.1b and ex.2, bar 9)) even though its prime was not present elsewhere in the Sonata,17 he may have sensed that the multiple usage of ex.12b in the scales exerted a greater pressure to disclose the prime version also and so he slipped the 'parent' as unobtrusively as possible into the second pre-recapitulation scale. If this hypothesis should be mistaken, there still remains a curious mystery here.

Finally, the end of the Sonata is also intriguing. The last cipher-scale pair (exx. 11g and h) rounds off the piece with the final farewell of the Ferenc Liszt motif, but the second scale pauses on the penultimate pitch to make possible one of the most magical moments of the whole piece: the two sustained `white-note' chords that precede the B major final triad. But when this last harmonic event is reached, the Cb in the bass is still sounding - at least, in the alert listener's imaginative consciousness, if nowhere else - and the harmonic resolution (and completion of the Ferenc Liszt motif) follows only after the tonic chord has been silenced. Authors will on occasion `sign-off' but, of course, adding their signature not as part of the text but after its last word. Is Liszt here completing his cipher-signature but, of course, only once the Sonata's other last sound has been clipped?