The sheer virtuosity of Liszt’s B minor sonata makes it difficult to read as a narrative work because there is just so much going on. It seems that within these 760 measures Liszt is trying to tell hundreds of stories, so it is easy to lose track of the narrative. This is quite unlike the experience one has when listening to The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a work inspired by a symphonic poem and with a much clearer narrative voice (although that could be a perception partially enhanced from Walt Disney’s animation). Because of its highly sporadic nature, one might think it would be foolish to analyze Liszt’s sonata through a narrative lens. After all, narratively as defined either Newcomb or Nattiez involves coherent relationships between different sections of music within the work. As pretty as lightning-fast scalar glissandos are, they are hardly relatable to anything other than other lightning-fast glissandos. Thus, we must look deeper into the piece to find the story that it’s telling.
The story is told in this song in between, above, and below the moments of virtuosic craziness. Liszt mainly uses two mechanisms to create narrativity: expressive tempo markings and call-and-response between voices. Liszt employs a host of tempo markings to create metric contrast throughout the work. Some are traditional (“Grandioso”, m. 105), but others are more unique (“Recitativo” (a term usually reserved for opera), m. 301) and, in some places, quite beautiful (“dolcissimo con intimo sentimento” (sweet with deep feeling), m. 349). These markings, in a sense, provide the work with some (very limited) ‘text’ off of which we can analyze. Their specificity and descriptiveness add to the analysis, as often it is hard to discern a mood so specific merely from listening. We feel the narrative speeding up or slowing down based on the player’s interpretation of it, but we don’t feel “cantando espressivo senza slentare” (m. 616) without Liszt’s writing.
These mood changes are critical to the depiction of the narrative. The transition to “Grandioso” at m. 105 is one example of Liszt’s forwarding of the narrative based on tempo and expression changes. Coming from a wildly turbulent section (“sempre staccato ed energico assai”) in which the voices are bouncing around the keyboard like a wild rabbits, the shift to a stately, more simplistic section where chords back up a prominent and simplified melody is indicative of an intimate moment. That moment grows, then shrinks into m. 120, where we reach the height of intimacy—the first truly recognizable theme (and to our surprise, it occurs as a simple, solo voice!) This section then stresses Liszt’s second mechanism of narrativity, call-and-response.
Liszt creates and augments ‘conversations’ in his piece through this mechanism, and there is no better example of it in the sonata than in the section starting at m. 120. This is an intriguing section because it begins as the most basic writing in the piece (reminiscent of the beginning of the work), but through exchange with the two hands, the section grows again into Liszt-sanity by m. 191 (“agitado”). The conversation is highlighted by moments such as m. 141-3, where the soft staccato 8th notes call for the answer of a middle-register right-hand chord. One can imagine this conversation extending to an argument as the music gradually picks up into frenzy.
This is a monstrous piece in all aspects. Analyzing it is not unlike trying to analyze each individual raindrop in a hurricane. However, recognizing basic Lisztian patterns used in the work, it is possible to derive a story from the chaos that Liszt creates.