B minor sonata revisited: Deciphering Liszt, The

Musical Times, Spring 2003 by Brown, David

COMPOSERS are normally very protective of the actual act of composition, wishing it to be unheard and unobserved. But with Liszt, as far as Karolina was concerned, this was not so, for she had a desk in the room where he normally worked, and it was common for her to slip in and write unobtrusively while he composed at the piano. If the present hypothesis is on the mark, we may reasonably speculate that Karolina would have been present during times when her partner was at work on this Sonata. Rarely, if ever, can a composer have conceived with his inspiration so close and visible, just across the room - nor can a dedicatee have overheard the working process whereby the celebration of her relationship with that composer came into being. It is a touching thought - though whether Liszt kept the secret to himself will no doubt itself

NOTES

1. Alan Walker: Franz Liszt, vol.2: the Weimar years, 1848-1861 (London, 1989), p.151.

2. `The Introduction to Liszt's Faust Symphony, with a postscript on the B minor Sonata', in The Music Review, 49/4 (November, 1988), p.267. This article is not listed either in the Liszt bibliography in the revised New Grove dictionary (London, 2001) or in K. Hamilton's Cambridge Music Handbook, Liszt: Sonata in B minor (Cambridge, 1996).

3. For ciphering Liszt used the German conventions for pitch identification. In fact, for a while it seemed that my case remained incomplete, for the Symphony's very first note could not be placed within any of four ciphers that then seemed available. Thus the theory was flawed and looked likely to remain so. However, the appearance in 1983 of the first volume of Alan Walker's three-volume study of Liszt solved the problem, for it contained the record of Liszt's baptism

into the Roman Catholic Church (Alan Walker: Franz Liszt, vol. I: the virtuoso years, 1811-1847 (London, 1983), p.56), when the future composer was named 'Franciscus' after the Franciscans and his godfather Franciscus Zambothy

This provided a fifth cipher which could accommodate this orphan first note - appropriately, it seemed, for this was the day-old Liszt's first-ever name, and the 'Franciscus' cipher only occurs this once to launch the Symphony's Introduction. The remaining four ciphers were derived from 'Francois' (Liszt's familiar name during his Paris years: two ciphers here, according to whether the 'is' was admitted to sharpen the preceding C), 'Ferenc' (his Hungarian name), and `Ferenc Liszt' (again using the 'is' to sharpen the preceding C). In fact, in Hungarian convention the surname precedes the Christian name; thus Liszt's final cipher could be described as one `of convenience' - though since he was brought up in German-speaking Hungary and never learned to speak Magyar

property, he would have been accustomed to using the Christian-name-followed-by-- surname order.

4. Kenneth Hamilton has pointed out that this scale is synonymous with the Hungarian gypsy scale. However, within the context of this Sonata, this is coincidental, for as ex.11 demonstrates, Liszt has clearly thought of each of the eight scales comprising his four scale pairs as a construction from two mainly four-note motifs, one motif being identical with one half of the gypsy scale the other being a stepwise descending tetrachord. Sometimes in these scales the same motif is used twice, but more often both are employed; indeed, of the eight scales involved, five are constructed by pairing the two motifs. Thus it is also coincidental that the twofold use of the stepwise-descending motif to form scales 1 and 5 (the first of each scale pair preceding the exposition and recapitulation) should duplicate the phrygian mode.