7 - Compositional Legacy

Summary

What can we make of Liszt's compositional legacy in his final years? How does Liszt's own objective, as demonstrated by publications between 1877 and 1886, compare with scholars’ common perceptions about his late style—adventurous tonality, unconventional form and genre, pared-down texture, linked to a dark, “disturbed” affect? Nuages gris (A305, see ex. 7.1), most often adduced as an example of Liszt's late style, will provide a reference point for what follows. While Nuages gris carries a G-minor key signature and G is its implied goal, the final sonority is ambiguous. Its sparse texture consists not of a melody and harmony per se, but of concentrated “gestures” or “fragments”: an opening linear unfolding characterized by a striking tritone, an almost motionless tremolando, sonorities slipping chromatically downward, and, at the end, octaves inching chromatically upward. With its ending unresolved, the simple, brief piece “goes” nowhere, leaving the listener with a momentary impression of ominous “gray clouds” vis-a-vis its fragmentary materials and unsettled harmonic terrain.

Although this discussion will turn periodically to textural, timbral, and formal aspects of Liszt's late compositions, it focuses primarily on tonal characteristics and affect in order to address these two questions: To what extent does the tonal experimentation of Nuages gris predominate in the output of Liszt's final decade, and, more importantly, within the music he chose to present to the public? Do other late pieces project the “desolation” that characterizes Nuages gris? In answering these questions about Liszt, we must ask, as recent criticism has done increasingly, whether a single character or aesthetic consistently emerges in a creative artist's last works.

Tables 7.1 and 7.2 provide a detailed overview of Liszt's compositions in the two media he concentrated on in his final decade: keyboard and sacred vocal (both choral and solo). Table 7.3 presents data on songs, the third medium favored by Liszt; in comparison to keyboard and sacred compositions, these diminish in importance after 1878. As summarized in table 7.4, Liszt averaged ten new pieces per year except for 1882, when he had to prepare works for publication after the highly productive 1881, and in 1886 when his eyesight had severely deteriorated.