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19THCENTURYMUSICan opportunity for controlling the rhetoric andpacing of the “Dante” Sonata’s thematic transformations.The improvisatory aesthetic of thefollowing examples, with their potential interchangeability(modularity), suggests they mayhave been engendered more by intuition inperformance than by premeditation—Marx’sAnschauung. In other words, some of thesetransitions may have originated at the keyboardwithout Liszt’s explicitly intending for them toend up in a composition, but at the moment of“composing,” elements of them were at hisfingertips.The transition between two transformationsof the principal chromatic theme is shown inex. 3a/b and summarized schematically in ex.4. There are three versions; the earliest (ex. 3afrom MS I 76 and deleted in Liszt’s hand) iseight measures shorter than the other two andmakes an explicit enharmonic shift between E♭and D ♯ in the middle measure, compacting theharmonic movement into one-and-a-half measures.The directness and brevity of the movesuggest an improvised transition to the extentthat it simply employs chords in different inversions,which, on reflection, Liszt extendedand composed out.The second version (ex. 3b from MS I 76,which remains extant in the manuscript), likethe first, makes both a registral and enharmonicconnection between transition and thematictransformation. But it extends the falling chromaticmelody for a further five measures, addsa brief recitative, and unfolds the half-diminished-seventhchord through flowing eighthnotes rather than block chords. Here Liszt leavesout the dominant-seventh harmony on B, allowingthe lone E♭ to pivot between the twoharmonies by implication. All these measurespoint to a more elaborate musical conception.Yet although they signal an improvisationalprocess more mediated by thought distancedfrom the performative impulse, other elementsin ex. 3b can be seen equally as the result of anongoing process of working out material at thekeyboard. The repetition of m. 3 (as m. 4) couldeasily result from the improvisatory practice ofgaining time and achieving hypermetric balancequickly and easily through a literal repeat,and the recitative-like passage is a long-standingtrick of the trade to “speak extempore”—familiar from C. P. E. Bach’s Fantasias to Beethoven’sop. 110—before launching into anothersection.The final version (MS I 17), also shown in ex.3b, is almost identical to the second, but differsfrom it in m. 9 by inverting the ascending chord,breaking the registral connection with themelody, and creating a new connection withthe harmonic bass note (C ♯ ). Such revisionsrecall Czerny’s advice that the performer mustdevote time and practice to achieve the capabilityof transforming passages “with ease andadroitness. . . . He must not be satisfied with asingle attempt . . . since the modifications inherent. . . are infinite.” 88 Plate 4 shows a facsimilecopy (from MS I 17) documenting thelast two versions.There is also a sense in which revisions, forinstance, the extension of the repeated-notechromatic melody in ex. 3a/b and Liszt’s decisionfirst to isolate a repeated E♭ , then to integrateit three octaves lower through chromaticvoice-leading, are influenced by a slippage betweenthe visual and the auditory. In additionto pure sound, there are the enticing spectacleof rapidly swapping hands and the rhetoric of alone hand, respectively. Traditions of seeingmusic in this way—a phenomenon Kramer hascalled the “listening gaze” 89 —can constitutethe speed of attack, facial expressions, and gesturesof the arms (as well as their absence) aspart of the music being performed. The revisionsto the “Dante” Sonata presented heresuggest that when Liszt was revising at thekeyboard his awareness of how physical gestureswould be seen by a listener may also havefunctioned as a determinant of “composition,”thus encoding soundless spectacle into thesounding work.A later section, shown as ex. 5a/b, illustratesthat in revision Liszt also made more substantialalterations to the material of a passage,changing the length of a transition, its use andreuse of thematic ideas, and its relation to furtherthematic transformations. Example 5a encompassesa harmonic move from A♭ to vii 7 on88Ibid., p. 50.89Kramer, Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical Theory, p.77.78