Nuages gris

Just as in his prime Liszt had anticipated some of Wagner’s more radical developments, in his old age – after he left Weimar and retired to Rome – he was thinking in terms that would later be part of the language of composers like Debussy, Bartók and even Schoenberg. Nuages gris (Grey clouds) is on one level an early, eerie piece of impressionism accomplished with an extraordinary economy of means. On another level, as the right hand draws it lonely melody over the harmonically drifting six-note motif but then rises ever higher through a series of twelve semi-tones, it is aspiring vision into the future.