Funérailles (October 1849)

Liszt’s Funérailles, one of the two most outstanding pieces in his collection of Harmonies poétiques et réligieuses, was inspired by the failed Hungarian uprising of 1849 and the execution in October of that year of the prime minister Lajos Batthyány and no fewer than thirteen Hungarian generals. The attractive notion that it was intended as a memorial tribute to Chopin is now discredited, not least because the first sketch for the piece bears the patriotic title “Magyar.” Even so, it is not entirely impossible that Chopin, whose death also occurred in October 1849, had something to do with it. Certainly – after the bell-tolling introduction with its rumbling pedal-sustained sonorities, the solemn funeral march and its extended, lyrically consoling counterpart – Chopin makes a dramatic entry to the heroic gestures of the Polonaise in A major Op.53. Unconscious or deliberate, the allusion is thoroughly appropriate and, anyway, it would be nice to think that Liszt was marking two sad occasions with one memorial stone, so to speak.