Nuages gris S199 (1881)

Unstern S208 (1885)

La lugubre gondola No.1 S200 (1882)

R.W. - Venezia S201 (1883)

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 going. He didn’t like its dissonant harmonies and what he called its “budding insanity.” Liszt did in fact suffer from depression in his last years and, as he said, his mental state was bound to effect his music: “I carry a deep sadness of the heart which must now and then break out in sound.” But this was not the only explanation for the often short, spare, even austere, harmonically liberated piano pieces Wagner must have heard his father in law playing in his apartment in the Palazzo Vendramin. Just as in his prime Liszt    had anticipated some of Wagner’s more radical developments, in his visionary old age he was still looking ahead, further than even Wagner could see. He was “throwing a lance into the boundless real of the future,” as he put it, and not infrequently hitting the mark.

One piece Wagner might have heard in Venice was the recently completed Nuages gris (Grey clouds). Though sparsely scored, it is prophetic of impressionism not only in its title but also in its sound – not so much in the opening melody with the tritonal kink in its line as in the rumbling pedal-sustained textures that follow and, towards the end, the right-hand octaves floating upwards through twelve semitones over whole-tone harmonies in the left. The incomprehension with which his contemporaries met such music did not deter Liszt from writing it. “I calmly persist in staying stubbornly in my corner,” he said, “and just work at becoming more and more misunderstood.” Unstern (Evil Star) is difficult to understand even now. It seems to be a confession of darkest depression illuminated only, just after a violently dissonant climax of despair, by a glimmer of religious faith in the form of a chorale (marked quasi organo) which, howerver, carries little conviction and achieves no harmonic or emotional resolution.

Wagner would have been even more alarmed by the music Liszt was writing in Venice if he had known that one piece, La lugubre gondola, was inspired not only by the funeral processions by gondola Liszt had seen passing on the Grand Canal below the Palazzo Vendramin but also by a premonition that Wagner himself would soon be carried away in a similar water-borne procession – which did in fact happen only a few weeks after Liszt left Venice for Budapest. Of the two versions of La Lugubre Gondola, the first is shorter and less dramatic but no less desolate in its harmonies and, in its 6/8 barcarolle metre, closer to its Venetian origin. If Liszt’s immediate reaction to the news of Wagner’s death seemed minimal – he is said to have muttered only “He today, I tomorrow” without looking up from his work – he gave true expression to his feelings in R.W. –Venezia, in the profoundly gloomy colouring of its opening bars, the painfully persistent augmented fifths of its inconsolable harmonies, its pointless fanfares and nothing-left-to-say ending.