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26 FRANZ LISZT
And how could one forget Berlioz, whom the nineteen-year-old Liszt discovered in
Paris at the premiere of the
Symphonie fantastique
, a work sustained by the concept
of programme music that Liszt was later to remember in his symphonic poems?
Captivated by the genius of Berlioz, he paid from his own pocket the publishing
costs of the piano version he made of the
Symphonie fantastique
in 1831. You can
hear an echo of the hallucinations of the
Songe d’une nuit de Sabbat
in the sardonic
laughter of the Sonata’s scherzo section.
And how could one fail to mention, among the works that inspired
Liszt, Beethoven’s ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata op.106 and Schubert’s
Wanderer Fantasie?
The latter, in its very Classical structure in four
linked movements, develops a theme that is much more than just a
theme: in fact the principal protagonist of the work, the Wanderer,
will be presented in different guises – noble, afflicted with sadness,
dancing, and then triumphant in the finale. Liszt was to build his
Sonata in B minor in an identical cyclic form.
The Sonata is a thought and an emotion that are indissociable fromeach other, the
trajectory of a life towards death, or the beyond. Drawing on a range of inspired
influences, it reflects what each of us may feel in our flesh and our spirit, a prey to
doubts and certainties alike, suffering sorrows, illuminated by joys. And it leads us
on the paths of self-knowledge in order to tend towards a more universal truth.
TheBminor Sonata is all of that, at once differentworlds and a singleworld.There is
even room for an appearance of Dante’s Beatrice in the sublime central movement.