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The Music of Franz Liszt

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Within Liszt's music, his goal was to project a state of soul. He said that music embodies feeling without forcing it to contend and combine with thought. In order to give his lyricism free rein, he created a new genre: the symphonic poem. This is a one-movement orchestral work with a literary or pictorial program. In his symphonies, concertos, and symphonic poems, he used thematic transformation. This technique is the musical expansion of a theme by varying its melodic outline, harmony, or rhythm. Shifting from loud to soft, from fast to slow, from high to low register, from strings to woodwinds or brass, he was able to transform the character of the theme. Thus, it would suggest romantic love, move to a pastoral scene, tension and conflict next, and triumph at the end.

Liszt wrote orchestral music, including symphonic poems such as Les preludes; Dante and Faust Symphonies; two piano concertos; and Totentanz. His piano music includes Transcendental Etudes, Sonata in B minor, Hungarian Rhapsodies, Liebestraum, nocturnes, waltzes, ballades, polonaises, and other character pieces. He also wrote numerous transcriptions of orchestral and opera works for the piano. His choral music included Masses, oratorios, psalms, cantatas, and secular part songs. He also wrote one opera.

The Little Bell(La campanella) is the third etude of his Transcendental Etudes. Within this set of six technical masterpieces for piano, he paid homage to the virtuoso, Paganini since these etudes are based on Paganini's Caprices for solo violin. The Little Bell was inspired by the finale of Paganini's Second Violin Concerto. Liszt used two musical sections and alternated them in continually varied figurations. Thus, the A section was in a minor key and the B section in a major key.

Liszt created the bell sound on the piano by the use of pedal point, or a sustained tone over which the harmonies change. With each statement of the A theme, Liszt sounds the bell through a repeated note at a high pitch that alternates with the main line of the melody.

This piece of music is physically challenging to play. Not only does it have great technical difficulties, but the distance between the principal melody and the bell notes exceeds the natural span of the hand. The pianist is forced to pivot the right hand back and forth rapidly, and with each variation, the music becomes more elaborate until it reaches its dramatic closing of loud octaves.

Liszt's etudes were transformed from dry exercise pieces into beautiful poetic pieces filled with both technical challenges for a pianist but also allowed the free expression of shifting moods to be heard through only one instrument - the piano.

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