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ROGER MURARO
... This sonata can be all things to all people, according to the inspiration, the
character, the mood of the performer; it can follow the instant, the fleeting
sentiment, or be straight-backed and noble! Every interpretation is different,
yet they all remain ‘the Liszt Sonata’.
I like to recall the dedication to Robert Schumann that Liszt placed on the title
page of his score, and I see in that more than just a simple gesture of thanks to
the composer of the Fantasie op. 17 for his dedication of that work to Liszt. I see it
more as a symbol: two works of genius, each dedicated in mutual admiration to a
composer of genius and identifying himwith the work inscribed to him.
Of course the structure of the Sonata was familiar to me; I had analysed it. But its
true stature escaped me when I played it for the first time: I was twenty-two years
old. Its form was weakened by the surges of enthusiasm my youth injected into
it – its themes presented then reprised in a different tempo, its highly contrasting
moods were obviously an invitation to me to do just that. Liszt’s Sonata, that fully-
fledged dramatic persona, that sentinel of the Romantic piano, was bound to
tempt the young pianist I was then: it’s a work teeming with complex, violently
opposed feelings, seemingly solid then suddenly slipping out of one’s grasp.
In the end, can the B minor Sonata really bear any and every treatment, as I
suggested earlier? I don’t know. But when I was young it had, in my heart, a raison
d’être different from the reason for which I find it so essential today. Perhaps one
should read into that the expression of the word ‘Romanticism’, that movement
which had been so thoroughly anticipated by literature: the whiff of sulphur in
Byron, the revolutionary engagements of Victor Hugo, the dreams of Lamartine,
Novalis, Hölderlin. And of course the writings of Schiller and of Goethe, whose
Faustian spirit the Sonata so faithfully reflects. These authors nourished Liszt’s
thinking, as did his love affairs – scandalous at the time – with the erudite women
of letters Marie d’Agoult and Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein.