Classical Music | Piano Music

Recorded on 04/21/1997, uploaded on 08/29/2011

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

In late 1882, Franz Liszt traveled to Venice and was the guest of his son-in-law, Richard Wagner, at the Palazzo Vendramin on the Grand Canal. During his visit, Liszt reportedly experienced a premonition of Wagner’s death and the funeral procession of his body through the Venetian canals. The startling omen Liszt gave outlet to in the first version of La lugubre gondola (“The Funeral Gondola”) composed in December 1882. Like Nuages gris, La lugubre gondola is considered one of the important works of Liszt’s later years. It is devoid of the virtuosic pianism that had brought him fame but instead embraces a stark and meager compositional vocabulary and a gloomy outlook.

Bearing the key signature of F minor, La lugubre gondola opens in 6/8 meter rising and falling along an augmented triad on the leading note as if even the gentle waters of the Venetian canals were joining in the funereal mourning.  With this accompaniment pattern established in the initial two measures, the melody emerges in the third beginning with a painful rise of a minor sixth and, like Nuages gris, proceeds on its course with little regard to the harmonies below it. Hovering languishingly around the dominant, the melody leaps suddenly upward and is accompanied by a chorus-like response to its grief-stricken elegy. All of this is repeated a whole tone lower, further darkening the mood of the piece. Following this repetition, disturbing tremolandi upon augmented fifths begin in the bass and the melody reappears, reinforced by octaves, and surges into a violent eruption. Just as quickly, the music diminishes into nothing again and the piece concludes eerily on the same chord with which it begun.

Two months after Liszt composed La lugubre gondola, Wagner died in Venice and his body was in fact carried on a funeral gondola to Venice’s Santa Lucia railway station as part of its journey back to Bayreuth. Liszt reworked La lugubre gondola in a second version, changing the meter to common time and greatly expanding its length, amounting in essence to a recomposition of the first piece’s material. The two versions have come to be known as La lugubre gondola No. 1 and No. 2, respectively.  This second version was also transcribed by Liszt for violin or cello solo with piano accompaniment.     Joseph DuBose

courtesy of the Liszt-Kodaly Society of Spain