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Item DEPARTURE, CONFLICT, AND REBIRTH IN THE MUSICAL LANGUAGE OF FRANZ LISZT(2023) Chen, Tzu-yi; Haggh-Huglo, Barbara H; Gowen, Bradford; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Departure” is a starting point to examine how Franz Liszt responded to and expressed his life away from his homeland through the musical language of selected piano works. After his initial departure from Hungary, Liszt’s relocations, changes of occupation, and artistic vocations led to conflict and disillusionment and at the same time reawaken his creative craft and religious calling to God to which his emotional experiences and spiritual calling give witness. While the idea of departure in Liszt’s case often signifies a geographical separation, it also reflects the resulting inner conflict, which fundamentally shaped his choices of compositional tools that he used to express conformity or deviation from musical traditions. This study examines five spiritually influenced programmatic piano works dating from 1839 to 1877 in light of Liszt’s physical and musical departures and demonstrates how he infused an evolving selection of extramusical inspirations into his program music, forms, and harmonic language. It provides a timeline connecting the events of his life and his artistic development. The tension and conflict of his inner life and creativity, after many twists and turns, will be shown to have led to his reconciliation with his Catholic faith, but first led him to compose program music. Liszt encountered a variety of extramusical inspirations around the mid-1830s. His reading of literature, ranging from epic poems to poetry collections influenced him heavily. As a result, he began to conceptualize program music. All five examples discussed here drew inspiration from literary texts, but his symphonic poems were inspired by poetry and painting. After arriving in Weimar in 1848, he developed his program-music concept in his symphonic poems and in important published piano works including revisions of earlier piano works. He learned to be more selective in quoting from a program in his compositions—he typically included poetry to introduce musical scores or as inserted texts in musical scores—and in the mid-1850s, he further defined his thoughts on musical forms and programs in his essay of 1855, On Berlioz’s Harold in Italy. During his subsequent prolonged sojourn in Rome, the unexpected failure of his marriage plan and the loss of his two children brought heightened awareness of destiny and death. These tragic events led him to reduce the numbers of themes expressing different moods. That allowed him to delve into his quoted program more deeply, which he accomplished by experimenting freely with various harmonizations. In his programmatic works that were spiritually influenced, Liszt responded to the tension he felt between his Christian ideals and his worldly desires by the divine and the diabolical in his music, by including quoted literary texts in the score that inspired him, and by using harmonies based on different scales. His musical conception of the divine was inspired by the musical heritage of the Church, which he evoked with pentatonic and hexatonic (whole-tone) scales, Gregorian chant-inspired themes and melodies, and harmonizations based on the Church modes. In his spiritually inspired compositions, Liszt also favored F-sharp major, representing heaven, as his key of choice, and he balanced a selection of consonant or perfect intervals versus dissonant harmonies and diminished intervals based on his readings of spiritually inspired literature. In contrast, his diabolical side is manifested in tritones, diminished seventh chords, chromatic scales, unexpected modulations, and his “diabolical” themes, which were part of his programmatic plan and represented by thematic transformations. This study describes his nuanced compositional progress in his conception and application of new forms—a modified one-movement sonata form, a freely structured passacaglia theme and variation form embedding a recitative and answered by a chorale, a three- act dramatic form—and in his use of increasingly sophisticated compositional techniques. He transformed themes to advance the plot of the quoted poetry, composed melodies to ‘sing’ the syllables of an absent but musically implied and thus quoted text, and even deliberately placed the texts of a Lutheran chorale or from the Latin Bible within his musical scores to make his piano compositions resemble vocal or liturgical choral music. These observations show how Liszt’s physical departures from Hungary, Paris, Weimar, and Rome fundamentally stimulated his artistic growth, in that his resulting life as sinner and saint, and his inner spiritual conflicts awakened both his diabolical nature and his ultimate search for the divine. Liszt succeeded in representing his strongly felt inner departures with deeply informed imagination in his piano music. I performed these five compositions on February 16, 2021, in Gildenhorn Recital Hall at the University of Maryland. Both live and studio recordings of this performance can be found in the Digital Repository at the University of Maryland.Item Hungarian Composers in Piano Music: from Liszt to Ligeti(2023) Li, Szu-Yi; Gowen, Bradford; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the nineteenth century, German composers held an almost out-of-proportion importance in the classical music world. However, with the advent of nationalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, composers in non-German countries such as Russia, Norway, Spain, Bohemia, Poland, Hungary, England, and the United States began to compose works in many genres that emphasized the particular national or ethnic qualities of their own native music. This resulted in the production of many works that greatly expanded and enriched the repertoire for the piano, beginning as far back as the Mazurkas and Polonaises of Chopin and the Hungarian Rhapsodies of Liszt in the first half of the nineteenth century. With Liszt’s ethnic-inspired works written throughout his life, followed by the ethnomusicological promotion by Kodály and Bartók in the early twentieth century, Hungary, this small country in Europe, started to play an essential role in music history. Liszt’s early virtuosic pieces changed the world’s approach to piano technique; moreover, his late innovations in harmonies and forms shed light on the path of modern techniques. Bartók was an innovator in developing a percussive approach to the piano, and he used folk elements in new ways that changed how later composers would write piano music. Ligeti’s exploration of textures, extreme dynamic contrasts, and hyper-complicated rhythmic and metrical design, established his unique role in music history. These composers altered profoundly the development of piano music in its technique and expression. I have sought to put these Hungarian composers in historical context, and show how their legacies passed on to the next generation. What is Hungarian style? Generations of Hungarian composers tried to find their own answers through different resources. Liszt’s interest in Hungarian style lay in verbunkos music — the old recruiting dance of the army from the eighteenth century, which had long been in the repertoire of Gypsy bands. Kodály and Bartók found their answers in peasant songs, and Bartók later developed his unique style that synthesized folk music and modernism. Dohnányi was another kind of interesting figure who insisted on German Romanticism when his colleagues tried to avoid the influence of European techniques. Post-Bartók composers like Jenő Takács, Pál Kadosa, and Ferenc Farkas identified with the use of folk music, explored tunes from around the world, and strived to find new paths through modern techniques. Miklós Rózsa, best known as a film music composer, wrote piano music that reflects Hungarian folk elements. György Ligeti was an influential composer of the late twentieth century who brought piano music to a new level of complexity and virtuosity with his piano etudes. His interest in extra-musical elements, combined with his knowledge of folk elements like aksak rhythm and others, helped him find his answer to the synthesis of folklorism and modernism.