To explain my interest for the topic, I want to start this research with a story. Everything starts from an early episode of my adolescence, a true love at first sight. I was 15 when I took part in a piano masterclass not far from Rome. As in all the masterclasses, I had the opportunity to listen to and discover a lot of new repertoire, but I was totally enraptured by a piece in particular. I just could not wait to listen more of that, and I was truly in love with a theme in particular: majestic and glorious, made by a simple melody accompanied by gorgeous, repeated chords and deep octaves in the bass. After some time, I found out that the piece I was enraptured by was Liszt’s Sonata and that magic theme was the Grandioso, one of the most important passages of the composition. From that moment on, I was eager to play the Sonata but, of course, I was not up to the task yet. I started to study Liszt’s music to arrive to play the Sonata: it became one of my most important goals.
However, approaching Liszt’s music, I found myself approaching the program music: music related to a (more or less) specific program coming from extra-musical worlds, for example literature or painting. In the years after, I started not only to be interested by the music I was playing, but also by the deeper meanings of programmatic elements inside the pieces and connections between the music and other arts. Studying “Vallée d’Obermann”, I could discover Byron’s poetry, and with “Aprés une lecture de Dante” and “Tre Sonetti del Petrarca” I found a new different way to look at two great poets of my country, Dante and Petrarca.
Therefore, when I started to practice Liszt’s Sonata, I was not satisfied: I wanted to know what program lies behind it too. But, when I started to read books and articles looking for a program, I found that there was not a univocal programmatic interpretation, but everyone proposed a different program and a different interpretation. The most common one seemed to put in relation the Sonata with Goethe’s Faust. Since there was not a clear programmatic vision, this was the starting point for this research, and the main research question became:
“What can be learned about the programmatic relationship between Franz Liszt’s B Minor Piano Sonata and its programs?”
The goal of this research is to investigate the most important programmatic interpretations of Liszt’s Sonata to give my personal vision at the end and to use what I learned to propose practical interpretive choices to solve specific complex passages into the piece.
I could describe my method mainly as qualitative and partially narrative and creative: it is qualitative because it is not based on the study of quantitative phenomenons, it is narrative because my aim is to show that Liszt's B minor Sonata tells a precise story and, so, to narrate it, and it is creative because, at the end, I give some practical suggestions for a different and creative interpretive approach of some passages. The process is classical: an academic research mainly based on the study of the scores and the available literature on the topic. Crucial for this research was an article of the Hungarian pianist and musicologist Szász Tibor: “Liszt’s Symbols for the Divine and Diabolical: Their Revelation of a Program in the B Minor Sonata”. It changed completely my vision of the piece, taking me to my current conclusions on the topic.
Since Liszt didn’t leave any clear source on the topic, the final conclusions of this research must be considered as a personal interpretation of the piece based on my studies and not a univocal scientific solution for the complex and probably unsolvable problem of Liszt’s Sonata programs.