La lugubre gondola No.2 (1882)

En Rêve (Nocturne) (1885)

Mephisto Waltz No.4 (1885)

Impromptu (1872)

In November 1882, when Liszt was staying with the Wagners 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, who was very ill at the time, would soon be carried away in a similar water-borne procession –- which did in fact happen two or three months later. Of the two versions of La Lugubre Gondola, the second is certainly the more dramatic and probably – with its extended recitative introduction, the harmonic dislocation between the melody and its rocking accompaniment, and the disconsolately wandering ending – the more impressive example of the visionary qualities (or “budding insanity”) associated with late Liszt.

If Wagner could have known En Rêve (Dreaming), one of Liszt’s very last pieces, he would have been fascinated by the ghostly presence of Chopin, delicately evoked in his nocturnal mode to begin with and elevated into an impressionist future at the end. Although at this stage in his career Liszt had renounced his virtuoso life style and the kind of piano writing that went with it, when he came to write another in the series of Mephisto Waltzes he had started in 1860 he recovered his old demonic energy. Had he lived to complete it, he might well have elaborated its comparatively sparse textures as well as its monolithic construction. Written at least ten years earlier than the other works in this group, Impromptu is an irresistible effusion of romantic sentiment with nothing in its harmonies to disturb the composer’s distinguished son-in-law.