FRANZ LISZT : Sonata, Elegies & Consolations (Leslie Howard) (1998) FLAC (image+.cue), lossless

Writers on Liszt are unanimous in their verdict upon the Sonata in B minor: it is Liszt’s greatest piano work, if not indeed his finest composition. It is also one of the few important Liszt works to be ostensibly free of any kind of programme or external reference, although, as Alfred Brendel and others have contended, a case can be made out for relating the structure and content of the piece to Goethe’s Faust. (If, as seems more likely, the piece is autobiographical or self-revelatory, the connection with Faust may still be drawn.) And Brendel is surely right to reject the notion, based on the use of the so-called ‘Cross-motif’ – three notes rising by a tone and a minor third, the first three notes of the plainsong Vexilla regis prodeunt – in the Grandioso second subject, that there is a religious dimension to the work. For a general analysis of the piece of not too technical a nature, Brendel’s essay in Music Sounded Out is strongly commended. Here, a few brief observations must suffice.
Without entering into the many different interpretations by critical commentators upon the broad structure of the work, we may content ourselves that the piece is in a single, unbroken movement, containing a slow central section and a scherzo-like fugato which, viewing the work as a large first-movement form, more or less play the part of the Classical development section as well as give the impression of several movements in one. Liszt was, of course, influenced by Schubert’s ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy in the shape of the piece, but strove to create more of a single dramatic design. He had, by this time, already written two large-scale piano works in which he attempted to fuse elements of two movements into one: the Grosses Konzertsolo and the Scherzo and March, but, excellent as those attempts are, it is only in the Sonata where the aim is triumphantly achieved. Liszt worked very long and carefully at this project, and we may be thankful that he never risked invidious comparison by ever composing a second piano work of these dimensions. The Sonata remains the most important and original contribution to the form since Beethoven and Schubert.
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