Year of Wonder by Clemency Burton-Hill

Author:Clemency Burton-Hill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-10-02T16:00:00+00:00

31 July

Piano sonata in B minor, S. 178

Andante sostenuto

by Franz Liszt (1811–1886)

My heart always twists a little when I think of Franz Liszt lovingly dedicating this piece to Robert Schumann, sending it to the German composer in May 1854, and it arriving chez Schumann too late – Robert having already been admitted to the Endenich sanatorium for the mental health struggles that plagued him all his life.

The original reception of Liszt’s sonata was disastrous: with its single-unfolding-movement structure, it was considered intolerably daring ‘new’ music, in which Liszt had messed with formal expectations and effectively inserted a sonata-within-a-sonata. (The impudence!) I’m sorry to say that even Clara Schumann was appalled by the work, finding it ‘frightful’, and as for the hugely influential Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick, he reckoned:

Whoever has heard that and finds it beautiful is beyond help.

Yikes. I suppose this should give us pause every time we raise our eyebrows or close our ears to baffling new music of our own time. Because this enigmatic and dramatic sonata, now adored by pianists and audiences around the world, is probably considered Liszt’s finest work, if not the very pinnacle of the Romantic piano repertoire in its entirety.

I have this crazy idea that poor old Schumann, if he’d been in a fit state to hear it, could have told us that all along.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.