Piano Sonata in B Minor

Liszt completed his Sonata in B Minor for piano in 1853. By then he had ended his spectacular career as a travelling piano virtuoso, and had settled into a new life as music director of the German city of Weimar. The Sonata in B Minor was the first piano sonata to be designed in a musically integrated single movement: The genre’s traditional three or four movements, fast or slow, are fused here into a single overarching structure. Schubert in his Wanderer Fantasy for piano (1822) had taken a similar approach, with a theme from his song “The Wanderer” deployed and varied across four continuous movements. Liszt knew and admired this work, and his sonata was a radical response to Schubert’s example. The sonata’s 30-minute single-movement design has a broad three-part structure, with two generally fast outer sections enclosing a slow central episode of great lyrical beauty. A small number of main thematic ideas, stated at the outset, are constantly varied throughout the work, so that they hold the huge single movement together while also sounding quite different in their fast or slow versions. The first public performance was given in Berlin in 1857 by the great conductor and pianist Hans von Bülow; the general response was bewildered and hostile, and the sonata was neglected for many decades. Today it is widely regarded as a virtuoso masterwork and as one of Liszt’s major achievements.