Après une Lecture de Liszt: Virtuosity and ... - Free

19THCENTURYMUSICplanned improvisation. MS I 18, no.1 (plate 1),ca.1839, presents the opening tritones, whichestablish a demonic topic of descent whollyappropriate to the journey into hell that initiallyinspired the artistic conception. 18 Laterrevisions to this passage in manuscripts from1840 to 1858 are cosmetic. 19 Dated 11 March1840, MS 1C.51 (plate 2), a manuscript hithertounconnected to the “Dante” Sonata, shows asketch of the Sonata’s characteristic majorchordprogression written in the Stammbuchof a female admirer in Prague, suggesting thatLiszt may have performed it there and, on request,copied this music after the fact. 20 Curiously,the progression is notated in C whereasit occurs (substantively) in both F ♯ and D in theearliest complete manuscript ca.1840 (MS I 76),where it forms the basis of a thematic andmodal contrast with the main chromatic themein the Sonata’s later versions (compare with ex.6). This discrepancy of key could represent akindly simplification by Liszt for an admiringamateur, but it may also suggest a characteristicallyimprovisatory performance in Praguethat was more tonally discursive than MS I 76records.The final version of the Sonata, entitled Aprèsune lecture du Dante—Fantasie quasi Sonata,was first published by Schott in 1858 as theseventh and final piece in the second volume(Deuxième Année, Italie) of Liszt’s collection18MS I 18, no.1 is in the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv,Weimar. A transcription of this fragment was first publishedin the Journal of the British Liszt Society 28 (2003),34.19See Appendix A for a stemmatological study of theSonata’s extant sources.20Liszt wrote to Marie d’Agoult the same day he signed themanuscript (Wednesday, 11 March 1840), explaining thathe had just given his fifth concert in Prague that morning.His comment that “the Bohemian aristocracy . . . havebeen most charming to me. Here, as elsewhere, the womenare on my side,” makes it plausible that the notated chordprogression from the “Dante” Sonata may have been writtenfor a female aristocrat following a performance(L’aristocratie de Bohême . . . a été charmantissime pourmoi. Ici comme ailleurs, les femmes sont pour moi). SeeCorrespondance / Franz Liszt, Marie d’Agoult, ed. SergeGut and Jacqueline Bellas (Paris: Fayard, 2001), p. 551. In1962 a facsimile of this, MS 1C.51, was published in acollection of facsimiles with the text: “Ein Adagio, dasLiszt einer unbekannten Prager Verehrerin ins Stammbuchschrieb.” See Alexander Buchner, Franz Liszt in Böhmen(Prague: Artia, 1962), p. 83.Années de Pèlerinage. 21 All four principalsources for the Sonata are now housed in theGoethe- und Schiller-Archiv in Weimar; 22 the1840 fragment from Prague, plate 2, is in thePrague State Conservatoire. Liszt’s original exemplarfor MS I 76 from ca. 1840 is lost, and allbut one of the sources from which I have workedare copyist’s versions; all show his corrections,alterations, and revisions. By studying thesedocuments, and following extensive researchby Rena Mueller into Liszt’s manuscripts, Ihave been able to update Sharon Winklhofer’sstudy from 1977 and chart the evolution of theSonata from its origins in 1839 as a sketchentitled Fragment dantesque. 23 The genetic andstemmatological information is presented inAppendix A (pp. 92–93), and Table 1; fig. 1gives a chronology of the copyists in the productionof the known manuscripts.The revisions and evident preparation ofmanuscripts between 1839 and 1840, 1849 and21Liszt used four different titles in the preparation of hismanuscripts, all of which suggest an explicitly literaryconception: “Fragment dantesque” connotes an unfinishedform that, for Romantic poetry in particular, pointed tothe infinite by its very incompleteness; “Paralipomènes àla Divina Comedia” means material omitted from the bodyof a text, appended as a supplement; “Prolégomènes à laDivina Comedia” indicates that Liszt changed his mind,preferring not to append but to preface his music to areading of the text; “Après une lecture du Dante: Fantasiequasi Sonata” is derived from Victor Hugo’s poem of almostthe same name from the collection Les Voixintérieures (1837) and allowed Liszt to characterize hisrelation to Beethoven with the subtitle. Liszt’s use of “du”rather than Hugo’s “de” in the final title is most likelydeliberate, drawing on the German practice of using thedefinite article to refer to a famous person or thing, andattempting to translate this into French. In a letter toJoachim Raff from 1 August 1849, Liszt refers to his pieceas Fantasia quasi Sonata (Prologomènes [sic] zu DantesGöttlicher Comödie), but this title is not, to my knowledge,recorded in any of the extant manuscripts. Raff’sletter is cited in Sharon Winklhofer, “Liszt, Marie d’Agoultand the ‘Dante’ Sonata,” this journal 1 (1977), 30.22In chronological order, these are MSS I 18, no.1; I 18,no.3; I 76; I 17; I 18, no.2; I 137 7 . See Appendix A for anexplanation of the sources, the findings of which are presentedschematically here as fig. 1.23Rena Mueller, Liszt’s “Tasso” Sketchbook: Studies inSources and Revisions (Michigan: UMI, 1986), pp. 147–54.See also Sharon Winklhofer, Liszt’s Sonata in B Minor: AStudy of Autograph Sources and Documents (Ph.D. diss.,University of California, Los Angeles, 1978), subsequentlypublished (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1980), pp. 53–84, and Winklhofer’s shorter study of the “Dante” Sonata,“Liszt, Marie d’Agoult, and the ‘Dante’ Sonata.”56