Liszt:Bagatelle sans tonalité

[achan1058]

If I didn't know it was by Liszt, I would have guess Scriabin.

[leoquis888]

@achan1058 Or Hindemith

[1seakyr]

What is truly incredible is that Liszt lived long enough to have gone from the Romantic period to the beginning of atonality.

[auerod]

My all-time favorite version. I've always felt this somewhat cold, detached VoxBox sound adds to the genius of the piece and performance. I'm sorry, I can't imagine a modern piano recording of this.

[jeanlucchapelon]

Varese you're completely right about the genious of LISZT/composer and the understanding by Brendel who is an intellectual of the music!!

[fcotugno]

it's not a strange piece, it's a very difficult one, and for the time it had been composed really something new!

[LovorkaND]

Great sound!

[nielswalen]

I can imagine that for Liszt this is pretty atonal. For our ears it sounds more like IN BETWEEN keys, since diminished chords, that make up a great part of this composition, are traditionally used to slide from one key to another. Brendel touches lightly one "soupçon" of a key after another, like a butterfly fluttering from one flower to another. Great!

[paolosilv]

After listening to 20th century pieces, you can see how advanced this piece was.

[Benne86piano]

I hope i am not the only Person who thinks, that Brendel is absolutely overrated... his pianoplaying is littered with extremely cerebral coldness... just my oppinion, i'm normally a receptive person, but the more i listen to brendel, the more i dislike his style... just compare e.g. Brendels "Czardas Macabre" to Kocsis....

[rva25]

@Benne86piano You can't even imagine how much I agree with you. His "greatness" is always was big puzzle for me. Just mannered and shallow musician.

[rhapsodyinblue18]

sounds more "diminished" than anything. though at the time, I'm sure this use of the diminished scale & diminished chords sounded quite progressive.

[DeimosGT]

This is where atonality begun I guess.

[playingmusiconmars]

Liszt could also be considered a precursor of the Schönbergian twelve tone technique, his Faust symphony contains an arpeggiated theme that uses the chromatic scale in way that isn't that different from some pieces by Schönberg or Berg.

Scriabin may have had the better approach in creating a liberated language of harmony but Liszts late works are a perfect illustration of why the breakthrough to atonal music was a natural process.

[BigBents]

he must have been on opium lol.. good stuff though

[cafity]

This piece goes great together with Prokofiev's "Suggestion Diabolique" =D

[coolguy9610]

barely atonal.....if atonal at all...

[OriginalBasaliskos]

@coolguy9610 Sounds pretty atonal to me. Not the most atonal of music written of course.

[coolguy9610]

barely atonal.....

[schonklang]

Grande Alfredo!!

[petezilla]

This late Wagnerian stuff is so weird, and I prefer where Scriabin picked up with it, but this is a really great piece and a great performance! Thanks for posting.

[PuresMusic]

Who said Schoenberg was the father of atonal music?

[flylooper]

Pretty cool stuff, considering this was before atonalism. I don't much care for Liszt''s music in general but I do appreciate his pianism and his compositional pushing of the paradigm.

[gorgalsi]

I love strange pieces. I also like the 2. transcendente etude, it has something ghosty, something gloomy. Marvellous !!

[ADyingFaith]

Can someone please expalin Atonality in a easy enough way for me to understand please?

[Divinemetal]

Tonality first must be explained. Tonality is the (extremely prominent in nearly all music from the Renaissance till today) musical practice of focusing on one note chosen by the composer, this note known as the tonic. Most chords and melodies will then be played because of their relation to this tonic. Tonality became VERY important in music like Mozart and Haydn. ALL their compositions start and end on the same note. Atonal music simply rebels against this and places equal focus on all notes.

[ADyingFaith]

Thank you for the explanation.

[Divinemetal]

You are most welcome, friend.

[LevMysh68]

This piece is awesome and certainly an oddity for its time, but it's decidedly not atonal. If you want atonal, listen to Schoenberg or Boulez. In the end, it doesn't really matter as long as it's great music.

[Divinemetal]

It depends on how you define 'atonal'. Compared with extremes like Schönberg or Boulez, it sounds more tonal, but this is because his method of achieving atonality is often more like a rapid switching of tonalities, which shocked people at the time. Compared with his contemporaries, this was definitely atonal. Either way, in my opinion, I find this more musical than Schönberg (whose music I love) or Boulez (do not love his so much).

[8aetroya8]

Chopin had apparently accused Liszt of being striving for eccentric effects, but.... this very thing is what made Liszt the father of modern music. By using whatever technique it took to express never before captured tonal expressions he freed up the palette for composers that came after him... Debussy, Ravel, Scriabin, Stravinsky, and so on.

Nobody had expressed those shades of life and human experience before, the whimsical moments that eluded so many others, Liszt captured with his technique

[8aetroya8]

awesome piece by a musical genius Liszt... Liszt inspired so many diverse schools of music composition.

[f1f1s]

A very nervous and full-of-strain piece! I wonder if Liszt was ill when he was composing it.

[abluesman100]

this is a strange piece

[TheNicosse]

@abluesman100 Qua Listz dimostra ampiamente di essere un vero portatore sano di Musica, soprattutto un pianista il quale ha intuito l'intero spirito dello strumento. Infatti non fatica ad esprimerne ed esaltarne- talvolta esasperarne- le qualità e peculiarità sonore , traducendo pari pari lo spirito stesso della Musica. Onore al Maestro, il cui udito sentiva ben oltre il sensibile, per accedere senza filtri e senza coscienza all'armonia universale- ed interiore- che regge tutto ciò che esiste.

[deadcalledpark]

i think it is quite remarkable, that this bagatelle was not published before 1955, and the complete science about who developed the atonalité has strongly forgotten this approach by Liszt. Sure there is still a huge gap beetween this atonalité, meaning the lack of a tonal centre, and the atonalité , developed by Schönberg, meanig the emancipation of the dissonance., but i think this bagatelle is a nice approach showing, how things could have develloped, if one had paid attention to liszt.

[Elfenohr]

well, liszt stopped going into this direction because people didn't like it. schönberg just didn't care about that...

[Divinemetal]

People actually *loved* Schönberg; my composition teacher went to a college at which they taught the twelve-tone method of composition nearly exclusively. He refused to do it. He did not find it beautiful. Now, however, he is teaching it to us.

[Elfenohr]

Yeah, it's funny how his reception changes during time :) what i meant was that many people opposed schönberg's method in his time. nowadays he is sometimes celebrated as the pioneer of a whole new musical world, hehe

[Divinemetal]

It is true. Part of the problem was that the Germans (where he originally lived) did not approve of it, even though it sounds very German to me, and is now often seen as the next step of Romanticism after Wagner and Liszt. I think that it is a great form of musical composition, to achieve certain goals, at least. I am about to start my first twelve-tone piece to-day for that class.

[Elfenohr]

heh, composing something sounds great :) ... just one note (myself being a german living in vienna): austrians don't really like being called germans xD if i remember correctly, schönberg lived only for 1 year in germany (berlin)

[Elfenohr]

Well, the relationship between Austrians and Germans is a bit complicated. The Nazis referred to all German-speaking people to as Germans. Today, it's as bad as calling a Scotsman British ;D (by the way, why is your post marked as spam? oO)

[Divinemetal]

I understand. That makes a lot of sense (Scotsmen are none too happy being thought of as simply 'British', I do know).

I removed my post because I had put a full stop after 'Austrian' instead of a question mark, so I fixed it and posted it again.

Incidentally, do you know about Schönberg's religion? I know that he was Jewish, but I do not believe that he was born into a Jewish family. I think that he embraced it later. Do you know?

[Elfenohr]

I wrote you a pm about the details :)

[hoink23]

"First victims of Nazism"-shtick and all; still a joke.

[Varese52]

The difference between Brendel's approach to Liszt and that of the typical keyboard virtuoso is that Brendel is far more interested in showcasing Liszt the composer rather than Liszt the wizard of the keyboard. He is one of hose who perceives that Liszt's music had far-reaching influence on the music of composers who succeeded him and that this influence would even extend into the 20th century.

[henseltetude]

Sounds like Debussy in the beggining

[3cplantin]

I agree that it is excellent playing. He's played Liszt through his entire career, from some of the Hungarian Rhapsodies and etudes early on to the Sonata and the later piano pieces, which he'd performed many times live and has recorded. I've wished that he would have performed more varied programs in the last 15 or so years -- not that I entirely mind Schubert, Beethoven, and Haydn at all (!), but a little more variety would have shown us all his scope as a monumental pianist.

[leomulder]

This lack of variety influenced that Philips Collection that Brendel supported in organizing, the XXth Century Great Pianists (or something like that). There you have a lot of great pianists playing basically the same basic repertoir.

But I still admire Brendel very much. In Liszt he gave more lucid interpretations than others.

[Kalen1457]

sounds a like Scriabin was influenced by this style. I recall those glissando like things in Scriabin's  late works. Ex. 1:09-1:13

[iamalittlespy]

Scriabin could have not possibly influenced music, since he was 13 years old when this piece was written. Its more likely that Liszt influenced Scriabin.

[Kalen1457]

Thats what I was saying...maybe you were just reading my statement wrong.

[iamalittlespy]

You're absolutely right. Sorry, I did misread your statement.

[BernhardBang]

The 'Bagatelle sans tonalité' is - as suggested by its title - a piece by which Liszt showed music how to escape from the tyranny of tonality. One way to play it is to make this apparent to the educated ear and I think Brendel succeeded in that respect. Obviously, there are other ways to interpret this piece and they will be more or less in accordance with your preference.

[aldebussy]

Beautiful. Maybe a bit uneven, but very stylized, clear and crisp.

[abmsghost]

Why do you say that?Please explain.I am willing to learn.

[Galantski]

Alfred Brendel isn't the first pianist I think of when it comes to Liszt, but this is fine playing indeed. Thanks for the post.