It’s not every year that Franz Liszt’s birthday—he was born October 22, 1811—coincides with the announcement of a new iPad. What better opportunity to look at a recent iPad app, The Liszt Sonata? And, if you need further numerological justification, consider that his Sonata in B Minor turned a hundred and sixty this year: the date on the front page of Liszt’s manuscript is February 2, 1853.
I’ve been obsessed with the piece ever since high school, when it was a set text for an analysis class. The piece is perfect for inflaming the eighteen-year-old would-be analyst, because of its ingenious construction. Detailed explanations are easy to find online, but there are two basic points. First, almost every note of the piece can be traced to three themes that are on the first page (plus one that comes a few pages later, and a fifth that comes halfway through the piece, just when you might be getting bored of the other four). Second, the piece, which lasts half an hour without a break, manages to follow two structures simultaneously: viewed from one perspective, it unfolds in three (or maybe four) movements; seen a different way, the whole piece is a single vast movement, following the classical sonata model (exposition, development, recapitulation). I remember staying up half the night covering a photocopy of the score with symbols and colored highlights to chart its thematic connections. My teacher wasn’t terribly impressed: many of the connections I’d found existed only in my head, he said, and that there were some rather obvious ones that I’d missed.
The piece’s complexities make it ideal for presentation in an app, where explanation can run alongside performance. The new app consists of a performance by the pianist Stephen Hough filmed on three cameras. One is an audience view, from the right-hand end of the keyboard; one is focussed on Hough’s face; and a third one peers straight down from above the keyboard, so you can see his fingerings clearly. The three feeds run simultaneously, and a swipe of the finger allows you to enlarge them one at a time. Meanwhile, a score of the work unspools like tickertape along the bottom of the screen. Hough supplies a spoken commentary track, which you can switch on or off, in the manner of a director’s commentary on a DVD. And a series of DVD-like extras expound various elements of the structure, history, and context of the piece. One of the best moments comes when Hough plays the original ending of the sonata—loud, bombastic, banal—which Liszt crossed out only at the last moment before sending his manuscript off to the publisher. His new idea was a quiet, magical coda, and the switch is one of the luckiest escapes in all of piano music.
When the app was launched, in the summer, it received enthusiastic reviews and even sparked speculation that iPad apps might “save classical music”—saving classical music here being synonymous with persuading people to hand over upward of ten bucks for it rather than immerse themselves in the bottomless swell of free product on YouTube and Spotify. The app is superbly put together, seamless and intuitive, but it’s Hough that makes it special. He is an engaging explainer and he plays the sonata as well as anyone currently performing. (I heard him play it live in 2011; in recent years I’ve also heard memorable, and very different, performances by Daniil Trifonov, Yuja Wang, and Till Fellner.)
What makes Hough such an ideal interpreter of the sonata is his combination of brilliant technique and probing intellect. (I suspect it’s also no accident that he, like Liszt, has a deeply held Catholic faith: Liszt took minor orders in the eighteen-sixties; Hough has published a kind of prayer book made up of Bible passages.) The piece, which most pianists would agree is Liszt’s finest, comes in the middle of his output, after the showy works that made him famous in the eighteen-thirties and eighteen-forties, and before the mysterious utterances of his final period. Liszt had retired from playing concerts, had taken up a post as court Kapellmeister Weimar, and was trying to consolidate a career as a serious composer. The sonata has passages of virtuosic show, but also moments of great inwardness—it’s not every player who can make you feel that they belong together.
Perhaps because of this, the sonata didn’t have an easy early life. When Liszt played it for the young Brahms, the summer after it was composed, Brahms fell asleep. When Liszt’s son-in-law, Hans von Bülow, gave the first public performance, in 1857—the piece had taken him two years to learn—the critic Eduard Hanslick wrote, “Whoever has heard that and finds it beautiful is beyond help.” For most of the nineteenth century, the piece’s difficulty deterred pianists, and its length deterred audiences. But those days are long gone. Already a century ago, Ferruccio Busoni declared, “The execution of the Liszt sonata is a problem that has been solved.” He thought that a kind of pianistic Darwinism had occurred, so that any serious pianist would be able to play this once unplayable piece by the age of eighteen. “Pianists of the present generation are born with the technique and style of this composition of Liszt’s in their blood.”
The idea that, generation by generation, the Liszt sonata might, in effect, be getting easier is a dangerous one for an amateur pianist like me. Two years ago, I decided that I’d try to learn it as a way of celebrating Liszt’s bicentennial. I was emboldened in part by a blog post of Hough’s explaining why the sonata is less difficult than commonly supposed, and in part by a performance that I happened to hear online. The player was an eminent German pianist and teacher who shall remain nameless. The playing is in a way unimpeachable, but incredibly slow and ponderous, somehow overwhelmingly pedagogical. “If you’re allowed to play it like that,” I thought, “I might be in with a chance.” I did manage to learn the piece, after a fashion, and some of what Hough says is right: long stretches of it aren’t really hard at all, and the moments of undeniable difficulty do yield to practice. Of course, my playing of the piece is very far from a professional standard (to say the least), but having made the attempt brings other rewards. There’s a deeper understanding of the piece, and, harder to pin down, a sense of having been expanded by the long journey that it takes you on.
One insight from learning the sonata is that, just as some fearsome moments do eventually allow themselves to be tamed, certain things that ought to be very easy turn out to be enormously hard. Perhaps the best example is the very end of the piece:
Five chords: A minor, F major, and then B major three times. Shouldn’t be a problem, right? And yet in context it’s fiendish. It doesn’t help that Liszt marks a crescendo through the second chord—which is an impossibility on the piano, and so must instead be read as a kind of challenge to the performer’s imagination. And the final B-major chords are tricky to balance, thanks in part to having the thumbs up on the black keys. But here Hough’s performance on the app contains a useful tip for the struggling amateur. Before the first chord, there are a couple of tiny practice strokes in the air, and then he lifts his hands off completely before the next one. He seems to weigh each chord in his hand before applying it with gentle force to the keys.
Photograph of Liszt: Time Life Pictures/Mansell/Time Life Pictures/Getty.
