Franz Liszt, who was the greatest virtuoso pianist in the nineteenth-century, was also a productive composer. But his tremendous technique brought the misunderstanding that his compositions were just flashy and superficial, thus creating an obstacle for appreciating his music. The purpose of this study is to encourage an understanding of the value of Liszt's music, especially his Schubert Lieder transcriptions. The study starts with an introduction, which states the revival of the art of transcription, gives the muscial background of Liszt and describes the instruments that were available to him. Then follows a discussion about his experimentation with the conventional piano techniques and how he applied them to the song transcriptions. Two transcriptions "Hark, Hark, the Lark" and "Der Lindenbaum" are analyzed in detail to show the transcriptive procedure and the relation between the poetry and the musical expression. A conclusion summarizes the study.

Franz Liszt's Faust Symphony has suffered neglect since its premiere in 1857. The analysis in this study aims to clarify some of the misunderstandings which have led to this neglect, particularly concerning Liszt's formal structure and character portrayal. In the Faust movement, the flat 6th scale degree (♭6) plays a prominent role in harmonic organization. Nineteenth-century composers sometimes used the distinct sonic color of chromatic-third progressions, as Liszt does here between C and E rather than diatonic movement by fifth to evoke a distant dream-world state. Liszt's conspicuous and form-defining use of ♭6 in the Faust movement suggests fantasy and mysterious elements ripe for programmatic interpretation. In this dissertation, I will attempt to clarify how Liszt portrayed the character of Faust by using the flat 6th scale degree as a crucial harmonic organizing principle in the Faust movement.

Many of Liszt’s early virtuosic works for piano are limited by a rigidified conception of thematic substance: the sonorous and harmonic impressionism in introductions and bridge passages does not disguise the finite and static treatment of themes. This problem found effective solution during the 1850s. With reference in particular to the first book of the Années de Pélérinage, it is shown how Liszt, even before Wagner, succeeded in making »his whole art [...] an art of transition« by systematic exploration of symmetrical, cyclic (octatonic, hexatonic) tonal spaces. The opening up of space within the thematic substance makes the forms of musical time themselves fluid and infinitely makes the forms of musical time themselves fluid and infinitely expandable, a potentiality exploited to the full by Wagner in Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal, and hinted at in the famously enigmatic line from the latter »Zum Raum wird hier die Zeit«. The introduction of »tonal space« as a compositional means can be logically related to an increase in the use of octatonic and hexatonic pitch collections as substitutes for diatonic tonality, a process that occurred around the turn from the 19th to the 20th century and that can be set against modernist historiographical narratives of the »dissolution of tonality« as apologia for the dodecaphonic method. Tonal space is further interpreted here as an expressive and not merely technical resource, carrying particular cultural connotations such as landscape, poetic transcendence, and magic. The importance of such meanings suggests the need to take a more interpretative and less »material« view of music history itself.

Nach Helmut Lachenmanns viel beachteter Unterscheidung von fünf Klangtypen stellt sich das Verhältnis von Klang und Struktur im Sinne eines dialektischen Prozesses dar. Als ein die Hörenden aktivierendes Phänomen repräsentiert der Strukturklang den am meisten vergeistigten Typus. Die auf das eigentlich Klangliche beschränkten Farb-, Fluktuations- und Texturklänge sieht Lachenmann hingegen als primitivere Formen an, die passive und saturierte Rezeptionshaltungen unterstützen würden. Eine Darstellung dieser Theorie des musikalischen Klangs und ihrer Verwurzelung in spezifisch deutschen musikästhetischen Traditionen des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts bildet im vorliegenden Text den Ausgangspunkt einer Beschäftigung mit den Fragen, ob Aktivität und Passivität sinnvolle Kategorien der Klangwahrnehmung darstellen und inwieweit nicht auch Fluktuationsklänge engagierte und detailbezogene analytische Hörweisen anzuregen vermögen. Als Beispiele dieses Klangtyps dienen langsame Doppeltremoli und -triller, die Akkorde in triolischem Rhythmus innerlich bewegt und durch die Verschleierung metrischer Schwerpunkte gleichsam schwebend darstellen. Das von Franz Liszt vom Klavier aufdas Orchester übertragene Modell spielt besonders im Streichersatz von um 1900 entstandenen Orchesterwerken eine bedeutende Rolle. In kurzen vergleichenden Analysen zur Behandlung dieser Technik bei Dvořák, Debussy, Balakirew, Skrjabin, Strawinsky, Bartók und Ligeti wird versucht, Kriterien für die Komplexität solcher Klänge und für das Gelingen ihrer strukturellen oder dramaturgischen Einbindung in syntaktische Kontexte zu erarbeiten. / According to Helmut Lachenmann’s much noted distinction of five sound types, the relationship between sound and structure represents a dialectic process. The most spiritual type is the so called »structure sound« because it activates the listeners in a particular way. Lachenmann regards the color, fluctuation and texture sounds, which remain limited to the sound aspect itself, as rather primitive forms, reflecting passive and saturated reception attitudes. In the present article, a presentation of this musical sound’s theory and its roots in the nineteenth and twentieth-century traditions of German music aesthetics leads to a discussion on whether »activity« and »passivity« are reasonable categories of sound perception and to what extent fluctuation sounds can stimulate engaged and detailed analytic modes of listening. Examples for this sound type are slow double tremolos and double trills, representing harmonies quasi pending and inwardly moved, due to triplets and disguises of metric emphases. Franz Liszt transferred the model from the piano to the orchestra, and it plays a prominent role especially in string parts of orchestral pieces composed around the year 1900. In small studies on the treatment of this technique by Dvořák, Debussy, Balakirew, Skrjabin, Strawinsky, Bartók and Ligeti, we attempt to develop criteria for the successful integration of such sound types in structural and dramaturgical contexts of compositions.

This study examines Liszt's use of the style hongrois in his Swiss book of Années de pèlerinage to reference certain sentiments he had experienced. The event that brought Liszt to Switzerland is discussed in Chapter 1 in order to establish an understanding of the personal difficulties facing Liszt during the period when the Swiss book took shape. Based on Jonathan Bellman's research of the style hongrois, Chapter 2 examines the Swiss pieces that exhibit musical gestures characteristic of this style. Bellman also introduced a second, metaphoric meaning of the style hongrois, which is discussed in Chapter 3 along with Liszt's accounts from his book Des Bohémien as well as the literary quotations that are included in the Swiss book. Together, the biographical facts, the accounts from Des Bohémien, and the literary quotations show that Liszt was using the style hongrois to substantiate the autobiographical significance of the Swiss book.

Franz Liszt (1811-1886) made fifty-six transcriptions of Schubert's songs over a period of eight years (1838-46) to introduce the name of the composer, who was little known both in and outside Vienna during his lifetime. Because Liszt intentionally preserved all the details of the original songs, these transcriptions present challenges for a pianist, such as how to produce a vocal line on the piano, as well as interpretive issues such as ornamentation, style, and conveying the meaning of the lyrics on the piano. The purpose of this study is to introduce pianists to study practices employed by singers, with the goal of interpreting the vocal aspects of Liszt's Schubert song transcriptions. The composer Robert Schumann once remarked that Liszt's transcriptions were perhaps the most difficult pieces written for the piano up to that time, and only an intelligent artist could satisfy Liszt's high level of virtuosity without destroying the identity of the original work. This could be considered a warning to pianists not to focus on the technical aspects only. The pedagogical guide presented in the study, based on singers' approaches to the actual songs, should help pianists to "see beyond the notes" and achieve a performance closer to the heart of the songs.

Ce travail propose une théorie générale de l'interface entre deux dimensions du fait musical : sa dimension sémantique (les significations que la musique peut contenir) et sa dimension pragmatique (ses usages en contexte). Cette théorie se situe dans une perspective naturaliste, au carrefour de trois disciplines : la philosophie de l'esprit, la psychologie cognitive et la musicologie historique. Elle part du postulat que la sémantique et la pragmatique de la musique sont des cas particuliers de certaines normes universelles (par exemple la norme de vérité) et certaines dispositions cognitives et sociales de l'être humain, pour l'essentiel non spécifiques à ce qu'on appelle la musique, l'art et l'esthétique. La première partie trace les grandes lignes de la théorie. Elle se fonde sur les travaux du linguiste et philosophe Philippe Schlenker. On y défend deux thèses principales : une thèse sémantique et une thèse pragmatique. La thèse sémantique soutient que toute signification musicale est indexicale, c'est-à-dire que toute signification musicale consiste dans le fait d'attribuer à une unité formellement cohérente de sons musicaux un ensemble de causes probables. Ces causes probables des sons musicaux peuvent être des entités réelles et/ou fictives, des entités objectives et/ou subjectives, des entités productrices de son ou non. Dans tous les cas, ces entités sont situées dans le contexte d'écoute de la musique, et la musique les « indique » à l'auditeur (d'où le terme « indexical »). Ces entités sont alors tenues pour être les contenus indexicaux vrais ou faux de la musique. La thèse pragmatique soutient que toute communication en musique consiste à organiser intentionnellement (y compris à distance, via des dispositifs de médiation adéquats, tels que des programmes, des techniques et lieux d'écoute, des rituels et autres conventions) la relation entre la musique composée/interprétée d'une part, et le contexte effectif ou supposé où cette musique sera perçue d'autre part, de sorte à maximiser la pertinence des significations indexicales, vraies ou fausses, inférées de l'écoute musicale dans ce contexte. La seconde partie du travail approfondit ces thèses en étudiant en détail trois phénomènes sémantico-pragmatiques suffisamment riches et complexes : la fiction, la narration et l'évocation. Cette seconde partie est bâtie sur l'analyse de trois poèmes symphoniques de Franz Liszt (Hamlet, Tasso et Mazeppa). Elle est ancrée dans le contexte de la querelle entre la musique à programme et la musique pure, qui a agité les milieux musicaux au XIXe siècle autour des mêmes problématiques que celles de ce travail. / This PhD aims to build a general theory of the interface between two dimensions of music : its semantic dimension (i.e. the meaningful nature of music) and its pragmatic dimension (i.e. the uses of music in context). The theory is grounded in a naturalistic perspective, at the intersection of three disciplines :philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology and historical musicology. The basic premise is that semantics and pragmatics of music are just particular cases of certain universal norms (i.e. the norm of truth) and certain social-cognitive dispositions of the human being, essentially non specific to what is usually called music, art or æsthetics. The first part outlines the main aspects of the theory, building on the work of linguist and philosopher Philippe Schlenker. We defend two claims :a semantic one and a pragmatic one. The semantic claim is that every musical meaning is indexical. In other words, a musical meaning is the set of possible causes attributed to a formally coherent unit of musical sounds, be they real and/or fictional causes, objective and/or subjective causes, sound producing or not sound producing causes. In any case, these possible causes are entities that are located within the listening context and are “indicated” by the music to the listener (hence the use of the word “indexical”). The entities that have possibly caused the musical sounds are, then, considered to be the true or false indexical content of the music. The pragmatic claim is that communication in music consists in organizing intentionally (including indirectly, at a distance, by means of relevant devices, such as programs, listening technologies, performance places, rites and other conventions, etc.) the relation between the composed and/or performed music and the supposed or effective context where the music would be listened, in order to enhance as much as possible the relevance of the true or false indexical meanings, inferred from the musical listening in this context. In the second part, the two hypotheses are further investigated by focusing on more complex semantico-pragmatic issues. We propose an in-depth analysis of three phenomena : fiction, narration and evocation. This three-part study is based on a detailed analysis of three symphonic poems by Franz Liszt (Hamlet, Tasso and Mazeppa). It is also grounded in the context of a central episode of 19th Century musical life :the quarrel between program music and pure music about the same semantic and pragmatic issues. / Doctorat en Langues, lettres et traductologie / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

This study of Franz Liszt presents the Hungarian master as a figure of conflicting forces, a sort of conflicting forces, a sort of Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde of music. In other words, Liszt was a dual personality. In this study of Liszt's major piano works, it will become evident that several factors were vital in the ultimate realization of these works.

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[ES] El planteamiento inicial de esta investigación surgió buscando una justificación lógica que ayudara en la interpretación de la música que los compositores tratan de plasmar por escrito en la partitura, a través de indicaciones en ocasiones poco concretas, con la finalidad de explicar al oyente la trama argumental y la expresividad inherente de la pieza. Con este estudio se pretende descubrir los patrones de trabajo utilizados por Franz Liszt en el diseño de estructuras pequeñas o microformas musicales, para así poder establecer el nexo entre éstas y lo que quiere evocar o describir con ellas. Para ello surge la propuesta de catalogar los recursos descriptivos y procedimientos compositivos y pianísticos usados por el pianista y compositor húngaro. El buscar e interrelacionar la idea programática de sus obras con el pensamiento descriptivo musical que las inspiró, analizar los recursos compositivos que utilizó para profundizar en la razón expresiva que motivó la importante transformación y renovación de las formas clásicas que efectuó y por último, estudiar el proceso de elaboración individual de la estructura formal de cada obra, así como buscar los paralelismos o semejanzas con las ideas descriptivas y las figuraciones o recursos musicales empleados por Franz Liszt. / [CA] El plantejament inicial d'aquesta investigació va sorgir buscant una justificació lògica que ajudara en la interpretació de la música que els compositors intenten plasmar per escrit a la partitura, a través d'indicacions de vegades poc concretes, amb la finalitat d'explicar a l'oient la trama argumental i la expressivitat inherent de la peça. Amb aquest estudi es pretén descobrir els patrons de treball utilitzats per Franz Liszt en el disseny d'estructures menudes o microformes musicals, per poder establir el nexe entre aquestes i el que vol evocar o descriure amb elles. Per això sorgeix la proposta de catalogar els recursos descriptius i procediments compositius i pianístics usats pel pianista i compositor hongarès. Buscar i interrelacionar la idea programàtica de les seves obres amb el pensament descriptiu musical que les va inspirar, analitzar els recursos compositius que va utilitzar per aprofundir en la raó expressiva que va motivar la important transformació i renovació de les VI formes clàssiques que va efectuar, finalment, estudiar el procés d'elaboració individual de l'estructura formal de cada obra, així com cercar els paral·lelismes o semblances amb les idees descriptives i les figuracions o recursos musicals emprats per Franz Liszt. / [EN] The initial approach of this research arose looking for a logical justification that would help in the interpretation of the music that the composers try to capture in writing in the score, through indications sometimes not awfully specific, to explain to the listener the plot and the inherent expressiveness of the piece. The aim of this study is to discover the work patterns used by Franz Liszt in the design of small structures or musical microforms, to establish the link between them and what he wants to evoke or describe with them. For this, the proposal arises to catalog the descriptive resources and compositional and pianistic procedures used by the Hungarian pianist and composer. The search for and interrelate the programmatic idea of his works with the musical descriptive thought that inspired them, analyze the compositional resources that he used to delve into the expressive reason that motivated the important transformation and renewal of the classical forms that he carried out and finally, study the process of individual elaboration of the formal structure of each work, as well as looking for the parallels or similarities with the descriptive ideas and the figurations or musical resources used by Franz Liszt. / Esplugues Esplugues, FJ. (2023). Procedimientos y recursos descriptivos del lenguaje pianístico de Franz Liszt. Los tres années de pèlerinage S.160, S.161 Y S.163 [Tesis doctoral]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/202193