La lugubre gondola (c 1883)

In November 1882, when Liszt was staying with his daughter and son-in-law in the Palazzo Vendramin in Venice, Richard Wagner confessed to Cosima that he was worried by the way her father’s latest music was developing. He didn’t like its dissonant harmonies and what he called its “budding insanity.” It is quite possible that he had heard Liszt working on La lugubre gondola in his apartment in the Palazzo. He surely cannot have known, however, that the music was inspired not only by the funeral processions by gondola Liszt had seen passing on the Grand Canal below but also by a premonition that Wagner himself would soon be carried away in a similar water-borne procession – which did in fact happen two or three months later.

Of the several versions of the piece, the earliest was apparently the one for piano in 4/4 time known as La lugubre gondola No.2 and not the one in 6/8 time known as La lugubre gondola No.1 but actually written two or three years later. The version for violin (or cello) and piano, a transcription of the 4/4 version with a few bars added at the end, is potentially the most eloquent of them all – not least because of the expressive nuances that can be brought to the recitative that follows the harmonically uneasy piano introduction and, later, to the melodic line drawn over its dissonant rocking accompaniment. While it clarifies the texture, it loses nothing of the visionary qualities (or “budding insanity”) associated with late Liszt.