7 - Idiomatic Lateness

Summary

The reception of the last phase of Liszt's creativity (ca. 1869–86, symbolically beginning with the final years divided between Budapest, Weimar, and Rome) has been determined by two powerful discourses: the progress from tonality to atonality and the idea of a late style. The idea that the verbunkos idiom played a significant role in these discourses has been lent some credibility in Hungarian musicology, as discussed in chapter 4, but not so much elsewhere. Part of the problem may well be a basic incompatibility between a discourse of national style and one that looks abstractedly at how pitches cohere and combine or, conversely, a tendency to limit a transcultural-modernist perspective to the abstraction of verbunkos scales. In this chapter, we will investigate some of these issues and proceed to broaden the historical and analytical perspective on the idiom in Liszt's final years.

Liszt and Lateness

Making sense of the verbunkos idiom in the last phase of Liszt's creativity is a fraught endeavor, particularly when trying to understand its historical and compositional significance, for the adjective “late” denotes much more than simple chronology. Building on the nineteenth-century periodization of Beethoven's oeuvre and the special treatment given to his third (late) period, Adorno theorized a whole aesthetic of late style in 1937, which has informed subsequent discourse on the subject. Concomitantly, we now inevitably understand “late” music to mean highly subjective music that does not participate in the prevailing musical discourse of its time and is, therefore, somehow not of its time. But beyond this quality of detachment from mainstream art-music history, definitions to this concept range widely. As Joseph N. Straus has argued, this is partly because the concept is individualized to fit particular artists. Moreover, categories for lateness “also occasionally seem to contradict one another: music written in a late style is difficult and simple, expressionless and intimately communicative, ahead of its time and retrospective in character, diffuse and compressed.” Straus therefore advises that “it might be useful to understand late style as descriptive of a group of works that share at least some of these characteristics, but not necessarily all of them.”