The radical change Franz Liszt's compositional style underwent in the last 20 years of his life was unprecedented in Western classical music. The tradition of music had been one of unified progression, even to the extent of Johannes Brahms' First Symphony being known as "Beethoven's Tenth". Beethoven's own three periods of composition are monolithic and united. Liszt's, by comparison, seem deconstructivist. Replacing pages which in Liszt's earlier compositions had been thick with notes and virtuoso passages was a starkness where every note and rest was carefully weighed and calculated, while the works themselves become more experimental harmonically and formally.Ogdon, 134-5.

However, as with his earlier compositions, Liszt's later works continued to abound with forward-looking technical devices. Works such as Bagatelle sans tonalité ("Bagatelle without Tonality") foreshadow in intent, if not in exact manner, composers who would further explore the modern concept of atonality.Searle, Music, 115. Liszt's work also foreshadowed the impressionism that would characterize the work of Debussy and Ravel, as shown in Les Jeux d'Eaux à la Villa d'Este (The Fountains of the Villa d'Este) from the third volume of Années de Pèlerinage. Another precursor of impressionism is Nuages gris, which won the admiration of both Debussy and Stravinsky.

Technique

Economy of means Compared to the creative abundance of earlier compositions, the music of Liszt's old age is unusually economic. Given barely enough notes to ensure their existence, his late pieces frequently lapse into monody, then silence. Sometimes a piece is open-ended, simply vanishing. This practice of "abandoning" a work in mid-air had been done previously by Frédéric Chopin and Robert Schumann. Liszt's practice, however, is more radical. An example of this is in the Mephisto Polka, where the piece is simply deserted at the end, without explanation, dying out on a solitary F-natural.Walker, The Final Years, 442. Long passages are spun out on single notes and definite cadences are usually avoided, often leaving the overall tonality of pieces in doubt.Serle, New Grove, 11:38. A basic rhythmic unit, instead of becoming the foundation of an expansive Romantic melody, now becomes a stark end-product in itself. Throughout the late works, there is a freer, almost improvisatory use of melody, yet one derived from the tightest structural cells Liszt could conceive.Ogdon, 150.

Tonality Liszt never lost interest in the question of tonality—a question which, for Liszt, was long standing. As early as 1832 he had attended a series of lectures given by Fétis. From these lectures, Liszt derived the idea of an onde omnitonique, much like a Schoenbergian tone row, that would become a logical replacement for traditional tonality. For him such a row would be part of the historical process from a "unitonic" (tonality) moved to a "pluritonic" (polytonality) and ended in an "omnitonic" (atonality), where every note became a tonic. In his marginalia to Ramann's biography of him, made after he had turned 70, Liszt called the "omnitonic" an Endziel or final goal of the historical process. He also composed a "Prélude omnitonique" to illustrate his theory. This piece was long considered lost but has recently been discovered.Walker, The Final Years, 439-40.

Remaining lost, however, are the sketches for Liszt's treatise on modern harmony. Arthur Friedheim, a piano student of Liszt who became his personal secretary, wrote of seeing it among Liszt's papers at Weimar:

In his later years the Master had formed the habit of rising at five o'clock in the morning, and I paid him many a solitary visit at that hour, even playing to him occasionally. Jokingly, he would inquire whether I were still up, or already up. On the last of these matutinal visits I found him poring over books and old manuscripts. With his permission I joined him in this very interesting occupation. Catching sight of one manuscript which particularly drew my attention, I picked it up saying: "This will make you responsible for a lot of nonsense which is bound to be written someday." I expected a rebuke for my remark, but he answered very seriously: "That may be. I have not published it because the time for it is not yet ripe." The title of this little book was Sketches for a Harmony of the Future.Friedheim, 161.

While the Sketches may have disappeared, Liszt left enough music from this period for listeners to surmise what that manuscript may have contained. Nuages gris is pointed out by several critics as a piece which could be heard as a gateway to modern music. One of its more intriguing features is its ending, which drifts off into keylessness and progresses to that point in a manner foretelling impressionism in music.Walker, The Final years, 440.

Liszt was also one of the first composers to experiment with bitonality. One example occurs in the funeral march he wrote for László Teleky in his Historische ungarische Bildnisse (Historical Hungarian Portraits). This march is based on a four note ostinato based on the gypsy scale. The question of whether this ostinato is in G minor or B minor, and the resulting tonal ambiguity, remains unresolved.Walker, New Grove, 14:783.

Chord structure Liszt became a pioneer in building new chords. Until the end of the 19th century the triad remained the prime architectural element in chordal structure. Few composers seemed to question whether chords built by other means were possible. One advance Liszt made was the use of minor and major chords struck together, a device he used in works such as the Czárdás obstinée. Another advance was in building chords in intervals other than thirds. This meant dispensing altogether with the triad in its former place of supremacy.Walker, Man and Music, 359-60.

A prime example of Liszt's experimenting is the pile-up of thirds in the vocal work Ossa arida, which he wrote in 1879. Inspired by the vision of Ezekiel ("O ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord"), Liszt depicts musically the raising up of the flesh from the dust by gathering up all the notes of the diatonic scale in a rising column, then sounding them simultaneously. There was no precedent to this approach and the piece retains a striking originality. A similar approach is the pile-up of fourths at the beginning of the Third Mephisto Waltz, written in 1883. At the climax of the piano piece Unstern! Liszt places two mutually exclusive chords against each other. Alan Walker quotes Peter Raabe as stating that the sounding of those two chords together is like a prisoner hammering on a wall, knowing full well that no one would hear him.Walker, New Grove, 14:782.

Harmony

Liszt's dispensing with the triad altogether as a basis for the harmonic aspect of music was well ahead of his time. Arnold Schoenberg started experimenting with building chords in fourths more than 30 years after Liszt had done so. People reportedly knowledgeable in music hailed Schoenberg's attempts at that time as "new." However, Liszt had done the same not only in then-unpublished works such as the Third Mephisto Waltz but also in published ones such as the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 17.Walker, Man and Music, 360. Even in a popular work such as the Mephisto Waltz No. 1, the originality of its piling-up of fifths at its onset was remarkably forward for its time.Walker, Man and Music, 361. The augmented triads of Unstern! (written in 1885) had already appeared in the Faust Symphony; the bare parallel fifths of the Czárdás macabre, as already mentioned, had helped the devil tune up in the Mephisto Waltz No. 1. However, Liszt makes more use in the late works of implied harmony, Chords hang unresolved, as at the close of Nuages Gris, and melodies are unaccompanied. Liszt's experimentation was accompanied by a bolder use of chromaticism in two forms—that which originated from gypsy music as well as that of Romantic style, with its sinuous counterpoint and enharmonic ambiguities.Searle, New Grove, 11:50.

Scales and modes Liszt's interest in unusual scales and modes increased greatly in his last years. This may have been a side benefit of his growing involvement in the political and musical destiny of Hungary as well as in nationalist music in general. He was led to explore or investigate in greater detail the scales of Hungarian and east European music. This exploration of a specifically Hungarian mode of expression would profoundly influence Bartók. The whole-tone scale was another source of interest for Liszt.Ogdon, 150-51.

A more complex picture In one sense, it can be tempting to think of the late pieces as an extension of Liszt's earlier works, as they exhibit a similar adventurousness harmonically, an intense chromaticism and a tonal ambiguity. What is new is the sadness of heart which pervades many of the late works. As tempting as it can be to think of Liszt as the father of modern music on the basis of his late music, looking at his achievements in these works as ends in themselves would be erroneous.Walker, The Final Years, 437. Liszt's technical achievements in his late music are one side of a more complex picture. Along with the increasing interest in Hungarian and other national schools of composition already mentioned, essential parts of this picture are tragedy in Liszt's personal life and developments in his friendship with Wagner.Ogdon, 135.

In his later years Liszt's problems with health, both physical and mental, affected his ability to complete compositions. By the early 1880s, Liszt was often ravaged by a universal sadness, descending without warning and threatening to overwhelm everything he did. He told Lina Ramann, "I carry with me a deep sadness of the heart which must now and then break out in sound."Walker, The Final Years, 437-38. In addition, the deaths of his son Daniel in 1859 and daughter Blandine in 1862 brought a phase of deep personal anguish that impacted greatly on his creative life. As he grew older, he was also deeply affected by the deaths of certain political figures, artists and personal acquaintances. These events, among others, triggered elegiac outpourings ranging from the unusual to the bizarre. Liszt was already known for drinking considerable amounts of alcohol with no detectable effects on his speech or piano playing; however, beginning in 1882, friends became concerned with the quality of the alcohol he consumed, which now included absinthe. It is very possible that alcohol both fed his depressive moods and limited his powers of concentration.Brown, 87-8.

One point not normally discussed with Liszt but not unfamiliar to late-19th-century composers was his consciousness of working in the shadow of composers he considered giants. In Liszt's case, the shadows were those of Beethoven and Wagner. He professed to find consolation and inspiration in their works. However, it is also possible their greatness may have had an effect on his own ability to compose. While he blamed his inability to complete compositions on his busy social calendar as late as the early 1870s, by the late 1870s he began to express fears of failing creativity on his part. However, most critically, Liszt was not entirely deterred by his insecurities or growing awareness of waning powers. He continued working until a year before his death, by which time cataracts made composition virtually impossible.Brown, 88-9.Walker, The Final years, 500-501.

Liszt wrestled daily with the demons of desolation, despair and death, bringing forth music that utterly failed to find its audience. We now know, in retrospect, that Liszt's contemporaries were offered a glimpse into a mind on the verge of catastrophe. They formed what Bence Szabolcsi calls "a conspiracy of silence" on the late pieces — one not lifted until modern times.Walker, The Final Years, 438.

Liszt's works from this period fall into three categories:

Music of retrospection Music of despair Music of death