3 - Understanding the Sonata in B minor

Summary

As a musician anxious to avoid formulaic composition, Liszt surely would have been delighted at the amount of scholarly bickering engendered by the Sonata in B minor. Such dissension is usually caused by the tendency of analysts to hold an almost religious faith in the truth of their own views, combined with an ability, worthy of a politician, to magnify minor points of difference into major disputes. We discover from Winklhofer, for example, that ‘for more than a century after its composition, the formal architecture of Liszt's Sonata has eluded convincing explanation’ – until her own, of course, and so much for Newman, Longyear and the rest. Presumably until then all convincing performances of the Sonata, and the copies by Reubke and Liapunov, were achieved by serendipity.

In fact, when examined closely, some of the analytical arguments over the form of the Sonata are largely semantic – there is a measure of agreement over the function of the main structural divisions, if not over what to call them. On the latter point, the analysis of W. S. Newman has been most influential, particularly in his coining of the apt term ‘double-function’ form, a structure that can be considered both as one continuous movement and simultaneously as a composite of the movements of a multi-movement work. In other words, the Sonata, though in one movement, exhibits elements of a first movement – slow movement – scherzo – finale structure.