Classical Music | Piano Music

Recorded on 06/04/2014, uploaded on 10/21/2014

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Après une Lecture du Dante (familiarly called the Dante Sonata), takes the listener along on Dante’s journey through hell. Liszt creates massive orchestral textures through the nearly constant use of octave and chord writing – there is virtually no “passagework” in the entire piece. The work opens with its prominent motivic feature of the falling tritone, an interval traditionally used in music to depict the devil. Two contrasting ideas later emerge: the “God” theme, set in F-sharp major, Liszt’s favored key for depicting the divine, and the Francesca da Rimini theme, which captures the image of the damned adulteress in a perpetual whirlwind just out of arm’s reach of her lover. Binding all of these ideas is a consistent melodic shape (often outlining the tritone) and the integration of motivic material throughout. The constant feeling of downward movement in the phrasing brings to mind Dante’s descent through the rings of the Inferno. Further, the use of repeated notes as a motivic device suggests a bleak, cavernous underworld, and the unrelenting drive to the bravura sections presents hell in all of its demonic grandeur. It is a thoroughly riveting work, and a listener should be prepared for a hellish ride through the bowels of the Inferno!       Angelo Rondello

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Après une Lecture de Dante    Franz Liszt

One of the greatest epic poems in Western literature, Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy inspired two compositions from the pen of Franz Liszt. The composer was introduced to the works of Dante in the 1830s and soon after composed a two-movement piece titled Fragment after Dante, which he premiered in Vienna in 1839. Liszt later returned to the work in 1849, concurrent with the composition of the much grander Dante Symphony, and revised it into a lengthy, single-movement composition. Giving the work a new title, Après une Lecture de Dante, borrowed from Victor Hugo, Liszt made it the last installment in the second volume of his Années de Pèlerinage (“Years of Pilgrimage”).

Liszt termed the work a Fantasia quasi Sonata. Though it is often referred to as the “Dante Sonata,” it is strictly speaking certainly more the former than the latter. Structured quite freely, it is based on two distinct themes, with the second being a transformation of the first. After a menacing introduction of tritones and dissonant harmonies, Liszt arrives at the key of D minor and the chromatic first theme depicting the tortured souls Dante witnessed in Hell. Liszt also used D minor in the Dante Symphony and the key has a rather infamous reputation throughout classical music of being associated with death. This theme is developed to great extent before the arrival of the second theme. Shifting to F-sharp major, Liszt now portrays the joy of those in Heaven. The chromatic first theme also reappears, though greatly transformed, and now appropriate for the heavenly vision. Ultimately arriving at the key of D major, the ending comes not in gentle tones that one might expect of a depiction of Paradise but instead with grandiloquent chords in D major. The final cadence, plagal in nature, concludes with resonant open fifths, hearkening back to the religious works of centuries past.      Joseph DuBose

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.