The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Franz Liszt · S. 178, in one continuous movement · dedicated to Robert Schumann · for piano solo · about half an hour in performance, most readings near thirty minutes
Mode
Piano sonata; a four-movement plan and one sonata form laid over each other, built by transformation of three motifs
Mythos
A fall, a struggle, a love and a quiet return to the beginning; the adversary’s motif becoming the lover’s, unnamed
Phase
One movement: exposition with allegro and Grandioso; slow section in F sharp major; fugato in B flat minor delivering the recapitulation; stretta; the slow theme and the opening scales once more
Presentation
Concert music; a solo sonata in one continuous movement, as published in 1854, with the quiet ending
Register
From bare octaves sotto voce to fortissimo chords across the keyboard; chorale, song, hymn, fugato and display; no programme and no words
Scale
One player and one will through its extremes; about half an hour
Governing Proposition
Three motifs are stated at the start: scales falling over a repeated low note, a leaping figure in octaves, a hammered figure in the bass. Out of them, in one unbroken movement of about half an hour, Liszt makes an allegro, a slow movement, a fugato and a finale, and lays all four over a single sonata form, so that every section does two jobs. The wager is that character is what is done with a material: the most hostile figure in the work becomes its most loving song, and a virtuoso’s sonata, expected to end in thunder, ends in quiet over a low B.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The work begins Lento assai, with two descending scales in bare octaves, staccato and sotto voce, over repeated low G’s. They fall into silence. Then the Allegro energico gives the other two motifs: a leaping figure in octaves, defiant, and a hammered repeated-note figure in the bass, marcato. Nearly everything of weight that follows is made from these three, stated in the first moments of the piece. Only the Grandioso and the slow section’s theme stand apart from them, and those are bound in by key and by return.
The work is the Piano Sonata in B minor, S. 178, composed at Weimar in 1852 and 1853 and published by Breitkopf & Härtel in 1854, with a dedication to Robert Schumann, who had dedicated his Fantasie in C, Op. 17, to Liszt. The unit judged here is that printed text, in one continuous movement, with the quiet ending. It plays for about half an hour: recorded readings run from about twenty-eight minutes to about thirty-five, and most come near thirty. No single performance is the object.
The design is the work’s first claim. The four movements of a sonata, an allegro, a slow movement, a scherzo and a finale, are laid over one sonata form, its exposition, development and recapitulation, so that each section does two jobs at once. The exposition is the allegro. The slow section is a slow movement and the development’s first stage. The fugato is a scherzo, carries the development on and delivers the recapitulation, and the recapitulation is the finale. No section can be taken out whole, because every section belongs to two forms.
Movement II
The first group, in B minor, is struggle: the octave motif and the hammered bass driven against each other, with passages of display between. The second group arrives in D major with the Grandioso, a chorale at full force, its chords spread across the keyboard. It is grandeur of the plainest kind, and the first great height of the work.
Then comes the transformation on which the sonata turns. The hammered repeated-note figure from the bass, the most menacing material of the opening, returns in D major marked cantando espressivo, slowed and sung. Its notes stay audible; its rhythm, its register and its harmony have changed, and nothing else. The most hostile figure in the work has become its most loving melody. This is what the sonata discloses: that the menacing and the tender are one substance, that character is what is done with a material and not the material itself. The disclosure is made in sound, and it stands on that.
It is a principle more than a condition. What it means for a person the score does not say, and listeners have supplied it: Faust, Gretchen and Mephistopheles, the adversary and the beloved; or the Fall; or Liszt himself. Liszt wrote no programme. When he did build the Faust triad, in the Faust Symphony, he gave each person a movement and a name; the sonata keeps the pattern without the persons. The shape is built, a fall, a struggle and a love ending in a quiet return to the beginning, and its naming is left open. That is why the work stands below the summit on disclosure and on myth, and why it does not stand lower.
Movement III
The slow section moves to F sharp major. It brings a new theme and takes up the Grandioso and the Cantando material again, now quiet. The Andante sostenuto is the quietest height of the work and its highest by beauty: a singing line and a hymn texture, the piano writing at its most restrained. It is a slow movement in its own right, and it is also the first stage of the development, working the exposition’s material in a new key.
The inheritance is the Classical sonata of three and four movements, Beethoven’s above all, and the Romantic sonata of Schumann and Chopin. The road to one movement existed: Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy of 1822 had joined four movements on transformed material. What Schubert had not done is lay the four movements over one sonata form so that each section functions twice, nor build an entire sonata from three motifs and end it in quiet. The swerve is real, and it is a swerve from a road already opened.
The stake was real too. Liszt was known as the virtuoso, and his serious ambition was doubted; to write a sonata on this scale was to claim Beethoven’s genre. The response measured the risk. A story told by William Mason, uncertain in its details, has Brahms asleep while Liszt played the work in 1853. Clara Schumann dismissed it in her diary. Decades later Hanslick wrote of it with contempt. Against them, Wagner, writing to Liszt, praised it.
Movement IV
The fugato begins in B flat minor, a half step below the home key, Allegro energico again. It is in three voices, built from the octave motif and the repeated-note motif, and its character is scherzando. The motifs of struggle are set in the most rule-bound texture music has, and they turn into play. It is learned writing made for the hands, not merely for the page.
The play does not stop for a new section. The fugato runs without a break into the recapitulation, and its return to the fortissimo octaves is one of the work’s heights of force. The second group comes back in B major, the Grandioso at full weight in the home key’s major. The fugato is scherzo, development and hinge at once: the form’s instrument for what the work knows, that the same material can be menace and play, and that the play can carry the argument home.
Here, too, the costs are plainest. The recapitulation compresses unevenly. Passages are restated a step higher by sequence, sometimes twice, where once would argue as much. Recitative-like links pause the argument, before the Andante and again in the recapitulation. Octave cascades in the exposition and in the Prestissimo stretta are display over a harmony already stated, brilliance where some hear bombast. These are the places where the form becomes a container and the law of transformation gives way to the rhetoric of the platform. They are fewer than the work’s first critics heard, and they are real.
Movement V
After the stretta the work does not end. The slow theme returns softly, Andante sostenuto, and then the falling scales of the opening, Lento assai, once more. The close is quiet: a B major chord settles over a low B. A virtuoso’s sonata was expected to end in thunder, and this one ends in near silence, which makes the return of the opening a conclusion rather than a frame. It is the deepest moment of the work, and the form has earned it.
The autograph survives, and the study of it is reported to show that Liszt first wrote a loud close and struck it out for the quiet one now printed and played. The printed ending is the work. The text has never been in doubt: it has been in print since 1854 and has needed no retouching. The sonata was performed in public from 1857, and its first decades were contested and thinly played; since the early twentieth century it has stood at the centre of every major pianist’s repertory, in readings as unlike as Horowitz’s, Arrau’s, Gilels’s, Brendel’s and Zimerman’s.
Its first answer came at once, in Reubke’s Sonata in B flat minor of 1857, by Liszt’s pupil. The one-movement plan built by double function passed into later music, though how much of that came through this work and how much through Liszt’s symphonic poems and the Wanderer Fantasy cannot be separated. What the work holds is narrow by the count of orders: one will through its states, the sacred in chorale and hymn, love, the adversary, time and the quiet at the end, with the family, labour, the state, history and the natural world absent. One player at one keyboard, for half an hour, holds a mind at its extremes and the claim that its extremes are one.
Act III · The Twelve
The large plan resists the subtractive test. Each of the four movement-functions also does sonata-form work: the slow section is the development’s first stage, and the fugato is development and scherzo at once and delivers the recapitulation, so none can be cut without breaking two forms. The opening scales are required by the end, which returns to them, and three motifs carry nearly everything. The give is in Liszt’s rhetoric: passages restated a step higher by sequence, sometimes twice, where once would argue as much; recitative-like links that stretch time; octave cascades that display a harmony already stated. A pianist’s cut of a few bars costs this work less than a cut of one bar costs Op. 131.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and the score makes it: the menacing and the tender are one substance. The hammered repeated-note motif in the bass, the most hostile figure of the opening, becomes the Cantando espressivo in D major, the most loving melody in the work, by changes of rhythm, register and harmony alone. The fugato then turns the opening motifs into play. The claim is that character is what is done with a material, that a will and a love can be one impulse transformed. Disclosed through sound, it is credited in full. What holds the axis below the gate is its kind: a principle of transformation more than an articulated human condition. Its meaning for a person the listener supplies.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Height is reached, and it returns. The opening is the sublime of the void: scales falling into silence over a repeated low note. The Grandioso is grandeur of the plainest kind, a chorale at full force. The Andante sostenuto in F sharp major rises by beauty and is the quietest height in the work. The fugato’s return to the fortissimo octaves, and the Grandioso recapitulated in B major, are the sublime of force. The close goes deepest: the slow theme softly, the falling scales once more, a B major chord over a low B, where thunder was expected. Held below the top on frequency: the octave passages and the stretta are brilliance, and some listeners hear bombast in them, not elevation.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The rubric’s distinction is myth evoked against myth built, and one figure here is built and bears weight: the adversary and the beloved are one, the menacing motif becoming the lyrical one, and the work passes from a fall, the descending scales, through struggle and love to a quiet end that returns to its beginning. That shape is in the notes. Its naming is not. Faust, Gretchen and Mephistopheles, or the Fall, are readings the work permits and does not compel; Liszt wrote no programme, and built the Faust triad with persons and titles only in the Faust Symphony. The particular is strong, the low repeated G’s and the hammered bass, but no person, place or act is named.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The inheritance is the Classical sonata of three and four movements, Beethoven’s above all, and the Romantic sonata of Schumann and Chopin. The departures: one continuous movement of half an hour; the four movements laid over one sonata form, each section with two functions; the whole made from three motifs by transformation of character, not by development in the Classical sense; a fugato as the hinge into the recapitulation; a quiet close. The stake was real: Liszt was known as the virtuoso, his serious ambition doubted, and the work met dismissal and, decades later, Hanslick’s contempt. Held below the top because the road existed: Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy of 1822 had joined four movements on transformed material.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Change the form and the work stops knowing what it knows: identity under transformation, one material as menace, love, prayer and play. In four separate movements each character would stand alone and the knowledge would go; continuity and double function make every character a state of one material, heard as such. The fugato is the form’s instrument: the motifs of struggle are set in the most rule-bound texture, turn into play, and the play delivers the recapitulation. The quiet end is form too, making the return of the opening scales a conclusion, not a frame. Held below the top where the form is a container: in the sequences and recitative links, and in a recapitulation that compresses unevenly.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Evidence, not promise. A century and a half of argument has left the questions open: how many movements the work has and where its exposition ends; whether the fugato is a scherzo or a development; whether there is a programme, Faustian, biblical or personal; what the quiet ending means, and why it was preferred to the loud one the autograph is reported to show. The literature has standing, from Sharon Winklhofer’s study of the autograph to Kenneth Hamilton’s handbook and Alan Walker’s biography. Performance stays unsettled in tempo, octave weight and silence, across Horowitz’s, Arrau’s, Gilels’s, Brendel’s and Zimerman’s. Held below Op. 131 and the Goldberg Variations on the volume and age of that evidence.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The work is the fullest statement of a real reorganisation: the multi-movement plan collapsed into one form by double function and thematic transformation. It showed that the piano sonata could survive Beethoven by changing what a sonata is, and its intrinsic force runs above its reach. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Reubke’s Sonata in B flat minor of 1857, by Liszt’s pupil, followed it directly; the double-function single movement passed into later music, though much of that reach runs also through Liszt’s symphonic poems and the Wanderer Fantasy, and the sonata’s own share cannot be separated; and it became the summit test of Romantic pianism, which is reach in performance. The field is the piano and instrumental music of the 1850s.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Survival is weighed in form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole and authoritative, in print since 1854, with the autograph extant; the loud close reported in it, struck out, is a document of making, not a doubt about the text. Presence: performed in public from 1857 and, since the early twentieth century, central to the repertory of every major pianist and much recorded. Fabric: it asks for the concert grand’s ancestor and has needed no retouching. At 172 years it takes the upper usual figure for its span, not the widest, because its presence is wide but specialist, a pianist’s summit more than a public’s, and its first decades were contested and thinly performed.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Command of the medium at its height in one respect, the piano writing. The opening’s bare octaves and silences; the hammered bass at the bottom of the keyboard; the Grandioso’s chords spread across the instrument; the Andante’s singing line and its hymn texture; a fugato in three voices written for the hands, not merely on paper; one motif turned into another by rhythm and harmony while its notes stay audible. The costs are the ones Liszt’s critics named and the score shows: sequences restated rather than developed, octave passagework that fills a harmony, recitative links that pause the argument. In Op. 131 and the Goldberg Variations the making carries weight in every bar; here, in most.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the Andante sostenuto’s hymn in F sharp major and the fugato’s scherzando play, or the opening’s falling scales and the Grandioso’s chorale. One law governs them: transformation of the same few motifs, under one sonata form, from one key to its returns. The slow section takes up the Cantando and the Grandioso; the fugato is made of the opening motifs; the close recalls the slow theme and then the opening scales. The range is wide for a solo work: menace, love, prayer, play, triumph and silence. The strain is in the Grandioso and the slow theme, held by key plan and return more than by derivation, and in octave rhetoric that obeys harmony more than the law.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The orders held are few and held together: consciousness, as one will passing through states; the sacred, in the Grandioso’s chorale and the Andante’s hymn; love, in the Cantando; the adversarial, as the motif that becomes it; time and mortality, in the fall at the opening and the quiet at the end. They are integrated by transformation, not listed. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is absence: the family, labour, the state, history, the natural order and the social do not appear, not even as the image of a society that the four voices of Op. 131 or the genres of the Goldberg Variations give. One player, one mind and its extremes: the figure counts those orders and no more.
Score: 7.1 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.3, The Inner Law at 9.2, The Living Form and The Imperishable at 9.1. Piano writing that turns one motif into another while its notes stay audible; one law of transformation governing menace and hymn, play and silence; a form whose double function is what the work knows; and a text whole since 1854 at the centre of the pianist’s repertory.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.1: one will, the sacred, love, the adversary, time and mortality are held together, but the family, labour, the state, history, the natural order and the social are absent. Above it, The Unconcealment and The Archetypal Deep at 8.3 each, which share a cause: what is disclosed and built is a principle of transformation, the adversary’s motif becoming the lover’s, and the persons it might mean are named only by listeners.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.5 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.3, The Inner Law at 9.2, The Living Form at 9.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.1, The Swerve at 9.0 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.3 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.3 fall two tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.3, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.1. Four of the five summit conditions are met, and with the Epochal Gate unmet and an aggregate of 8.7 the work stands in Tier IV.
Basis · the score of the Piano Sonata in B minor, S. 178, as published by Breitkopf & Härtel in 1854, in one continuous movement with the quiet ending, and its performance tradition, read from knowledge under the desk’s convention for concert music; no score, edition or recording was in hand. The unit is the printed text. The loud close reported in the autograph, struck out by Liszt, stands outside it and is evidence of the making only. Performances and recordings are evidence, and no single one is the object. There are no words in the work, and none is quoted. No programme by Liszt survives; the Faustian and other readings belong to listeners and critics and are not credited as built. Details that could not be verified, among them the day of completion on the autograph, the bar count and the bars of the landmarks, the first performer and place, the dates of the literature and of the recordings, Liszt’s own earlier essays in the plan, the later works traced to this one, and the wording of contemporary verdicts, are not given; the running time is a range across the recorded tradition, not a measurement. The sound of the work as heard is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.