Classical Music | Piano Music

Recorded on 05/29/2012, uploaded on 05/29/2012

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

The ideas of Mephistopheles, Heaven and Hell, death, faith and religion preoccupied Liszt’s musical genius for many decades. In the late 1830s, Liszt sketched a piece consisting of two movements for piano which he called Fragment after Dante. It wasn’t until he settled in Weimar in 1849 that he undertook the task of revising this work to its final version that was published in 1856 as part of Années de pèlerinage (Years of Pilgrimage), a cycle of pieces for piano inspired from examples of art ranging from literature to architecture as well as nature and geographical locations.

Regarded by many as a religious poem, Dante’s epic 'Divine Comedy' describes an imaginary journey through Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory) and Paradiso (Paradise). The opportunity to depict Hell’s torment, desperate grief, and eternal pain, and Paradise’s happiness, ecstasy, and heavenly joy, aroused Liszt’s imagination and enabled him to transfer these impressions to the musical score. As in many of his works, Liszt uses Thematic Transformation, a musical technique to which Liszt contributed extensively in its development; a basic motive or a theme is reprised throughout a musical work, but it undergoes constant transformations and disguises and is made to appear in several contrasting roles. The transformations of the musical elements serve the purpose of "unity within variety", a signature of List's musical style. Being a highly virtuosic piece as well as compositional achievement, the one-movement sonata leaves no doubts about its special place in piano literature.        Victor Stanislavsky

Après une Lecture de Dante (Fantasia quasi Sonata)  Franz Liszt

One of the greatest epic poems in Western literature, Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy inspired two compositions from the pen of Franz Liszt. The composer was introduced to the works of Dante in the 1830s and soon after composed a two-movement piece titled Fragment after Dante, which he premiered in Vienna in 1839. Liszt later returned to the work in 1849, concurrent with the composition of the much grander Dante Symphony, and revised it into a lengthy, single-movement composition. Giving the work a new title, Après une Lecture de Dante, borrowed from Victor Hugo, Liszt made it the last installment in the second volume of his Années de Pèlerinage (“Years of Pilgrimage”).

Liszt termed the work a Fantasia quasi Sonata. Though it is often referred to as the “Dante Sonata,” it is strictly speaking certainly more the former than the latter. Structured quite freely, it is based on two distinct themes, with the second being a transformation of the first. After a menacing introduction of tritones and dissonant harmonies, Liszt arrives at the key of D minor and the chromatic first theme depicting the tortured souls Dante witnessed in Hell. Liszt also used D minor in the Dante Symphony and the key has a rather infamous reputation throughout classical music of being associated with death. This theme is developed to great extent before the arrival of the second theme. Shifting to F-sharp major, Liszt now portrays the joy of those in Heaven. The chromatic first theme also reappears, though greatly transformed, and now appropriate for the heavenly vision. Ultimately arriving at the key of D major, the ending comes not in gentle tones that one might expect of a depiction of Paradise but instead with grandiloquent chords in D major. The final cadence, plagal in nature, concludes with resonant open fifths, hearkening back to the religious works of centuries past.      Joseph DuBose

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.